


Give Thanks to Broken Bones

by thepartyresponsible



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Bodyguard, Canon-Typical Violence, Domestic Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Kid Fic, M/M, Slow Burn, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2020-08-10 03:00:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 40,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20128243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepartyresponsible/pseuds/thepartyresponsible
Summary: The bodyguard is incredibly well-respected in the superhero single parent community. He is also, Tony’s realizing, something of an asshole.





	1. Prologue

If the universe had any mercy, Aldrich Killian would’ve incinerated himself on a slow weekend. A single spare molecule of mercy would’ve had him exploding himself while alone in his basement, or in a suitably reinforced laboratory. What happens instead is Aldrich Killian fucks around playing God on an inexplicable _Monday morning _and instantly cremates himself and forty-seven other people.

One of those people is Maya Hansen, a botanist Tony met once at a New Year’s Eve party. A New Year’s Eve party that took place two and a half months before the incident in Afghanistan.

He doesn’t remember much about her. She’d been sweet, he thinks. Crooked smile, brilliant mind. Her eyes were green, he thinks. Or brown. Hazel? He can’t remember. It makes him feel like an asshole, but he can’t remember.

“Are we gonna talk about this?” Barton asks, on the flight back from dealing with yet another nightmare in Sokovia.

They’d rushed things, he thinks. There at the end. Cut a few corners that Steve would normally be hounding them about, except he’s been wide-eyed and quiet since Fury patched in to deliver the news.

“No, Barton,” Tony says. “We’re not going to talk about this. What’s there to talk about?”

“I mean,” Barton says, slow and measured, feeling his way forward. There’s a strange note to his voice. It’s pinging around in Tony’s brain, raising alarms. “Kinda sounds like there’s a whole secret kid to talk about, Stark.”

“Clint,” Steve says, sharp. “It’s none of our business.”

“_It_,” Clint repeats. And the note in his voice resolves, finds a match in Tony’s memory. That’s anger. Clint Barton is pissed. “It’s not an ‘it,’ Cap. She’s a fucking kid we didn’t know about.”

Steve runs a hand down his face. There’s dirt smeared along the blade of his jaw. His eyes settle briefly on Tony and then dart away again. “Family business, Clint,” he repeats, stubbornly. “And none of ours.”

There’s silence for a few seconds. Up riding copilot, Natasha leans over to murmur something soft in Barton’s ear. She’s talking him down, Tony thinks. She doesn’t need to do that often. Not during missions. Barton’s steady in the field and a damn disaster everywhere else. If he has a trademark other than his aim, that’s it. And they aren’t technically out of the field until the quinjet touches down back home.

“I just wanna know,” Clint says, breaking the silence, leaning away from Natasha, “if there are any others. That’s all I wanna know. Because there was nothing about this girl in the SHIELD files. There was nothing about this girl _anywhere_. And if we aren’t checking up on her, and Stark’s not checking up on her, then she could’ve been black-bagged and hauled off to some bullshit bunker at any point to be used as leverage.”

Tony swallows. He looks down at his hands. They shake for a second and then go still.

_Black-bagged and hauled off_, he thinks. _Used as leverage. _

“So I want to know,” Clint continues. “If there are others. And I want to know why the hell we didn’t know about her. Fuck’s sake, Stark, you didn’t even bring her around for Christmas.”

Tony’s face drops into his hands. He rubs at his eyes, feels the sharp ache of the cut on his forehead reopening all over again. Here he is, fresh from battle, bruised up and bloodied. Heading back to New York to reclaim his kid from Fury’s dubiously competent custody.

By the time he gets there, she’s going to be fully indoctrinated. She’s going to have a SHIELD nametag and subdermal tracker.

By the time he gets there, Fury will have spent more time with this kid than Tony has in her entire life. She’ll know Fury better than she knows her own father.

“Fuck you, Barton,” he says, because he feels like he’d normally be deeply offended by the insinuations Barton’s throwing around like confetti. If his head and heart weren’t fully of buzzing static, maybe he’d have room left to be angry. “You didn’t know because I didn’t know. Maya never told me.”

“Oh.” Barton’s silent for a second. When he looks back over his shoulder, his face is unreadable. Beside him, Natasha, apparently feeling merciful, has carefully arranged her features into an expression of gentle concern.

“Shit, Tony,” Clint says. “Sorry.”

And then the whole plane goes quiet, everyone finding their own particular patch of gray metal to stare at, until the quinjet touches down and they all disembark together.

Tony usually ditches SHIELD HQ as quickly as possible, doesn’t bother with their shitty locker room showers when he can be back at his own private bathroom in ten minutes. But he stays this time, rinses off, gets the blood and plaster and dirt off his skin and out of his hair.

He keeps thinking about Maya. The quick flash of her smile, the cadence of her laugh, the way she leaned forward when he spoke like she was drawing wisdom right out of him.

He remembers not being able to look away from her eyes. They’d been lively, and clever. They’d laughed from clear across the room, made him feel like he was being let in on the best joke of the night.

But he still can’t remember what color they’d been. Not for the life of him. Dark, he’s sure. Not blue. Golden brown? Dark green?

When he steps out of the shower, he finds a clean set of clothes lying neatly folded on a bench nearby. He pulls on the white t-shirt and gray sweats, but he opts not to subject himself to the purple hoodie.

The shirt fits, but he has to roll the sweats up three times to avoid stepping on the heels. Everything’s worn thin and smells of too many washes with cheap detergent. He needs to buy Barton better clothes.

“Do you want us to go with you?” Steve asks, when Tony emerges from the locker room to find all of them slouched against the opposite wall.

They corralled Bruce from somewhere, and he’s standing there with his hands in his pockets, looking earnest and uncomfortable.

“I absolutely do not want that,” Tony says, tossing the hoodie to Barton. “You’ll scare the kid.”

Clint looks pained, but he keeps his mouth shut, probably because he’s still feeling bad about what he said earlier. Bruce gives Tony one of his grimacing smiles, the sad ones he saves for failed experiments or bad days. Natasha just nods, efficient and controlled, and herds Barton and Banner down the hallway.

“Are you sure?” Steve asks. “I could call Miss Potts for you. Or Happy. You don’t have to--”

“She’s a six-year-old girl, Rogers,” Tony snaps. “I think I can handle it on my own.”

She’s a six-year-old girl he’s never met. And Tony hasn’t been around a six-year-old since he _was _one.

“Alright,” Steve says, with a slow nod. He looks the way he always does when he thinks one of his people is making a stupid, self-sacrificing decision. All grim approval and slight discomfort, like he’s a little annoyed that someone managed to beat him to throwing themselves on a live grenade. “Well,” he says. “See you around, Stark. Let me know if you need anything.”

“Sure,” Tony says. Although he can’t for the life of him imagine what he’s supposed to need from Steve or why he’s suddenly interested in offering.

Steve nods, claps him on the shoulder, and heads up the hallway.

Tony tugs at Barton’s worn, ill-fitting clothes and then forces himself to start walking.

It’s just a kid, he thinks. Just a six-year-old girl he’s never met who lost her mother this morning because no one ever taught Aldrich Killian about appropriate laboratory safety measures. Just some kid who’s been functionally orphaned, and Tony knows how to play nice with orphans.

Hell, his whole damn team is orphans. _He’s _an orphan.

He knocks on Fury’s door and then pushes it open without waiting for an invitation. Fury’s seated at his desk, blue crayon in hand, carefully shading in something on a piece of paper in front of him. There’s a girl sitting across the desk from him, legs drawn up into the chair. She has a mess of dark brown hair curling down her back, and she’s wearing a yellow shirt and dark shorts and tiny Iron Man light-up sneakers.

After a moment, she twists to look at him.

He can see parts of himself in her face. The geometry of her cheekbones, the stubborn jut of her chin. And that’s how genetics work, so he doesn’t know why it hits him like an uppercut from the Hulk.

He takes a breath, and then another. His hand tightens on the door.

He’s being weird. He should stop that.

“Oh,” she says. Her expression is serious. Troubled, but not frightened. Like he’s an unexpected but not unwelcome guest. “You’re my dad.”

Tony blinks and blinks again.

She slides down out of her chair, and her Iron Man light-up sneakers don’t light up as she makes her way across the room. She stops in front of him and then holds her hand out, very politely. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Mia.”

Tony finds himself – ludicrously, unbelievably – shaking hands with his own six-year-old daughter.

And then, suddenly, he remembers. He remembers the exact shade of Maya’s eyes. They’d been a dark honeyed brown. Bright and beautiful and intelligent.

They are, he realizes, the exact same shade as Mia’s.


	2. Chapter 1

The bodyguard is incredibly well-respected in the superhero single parent community. He is also, Tony’s realizing, something of an asshole.

He shows up half an hour early for his interview and then proceeds to disappear from the security feeds for fifteen minutes before manifesting in the elevator shaft, setting off the fire alarms by smoking as he tries to hack his way into the private floors.

“You could’ve picked up a keycard at the front desk,” Tony tells him, after he has JARVIS open the elevator doors before this asshole falls to his death and creates a really complicated afternoon for the custodial staff. “We had one made for you.”

“I don’t like swiping things,” the man tells him. Says it right to his face, without even a single hint of shame.

“Are you a mutant?” Tony asks.

The look he gets back is eloquently derisive. “Why? You got a problem with mutants? Isn’t Steve Rogers on your team?”

“Rogers isn’t a mutant,” Tony says. “And, anyway, no, I don’t have a problem with mutants. I’m just wondering how you got in the elevator shaft.”

“Carefully,” the man tells him. He brings his cigarette to his mouth and holds it in place with his teeth while he maneuvers his way out of the elevator shaft. His boots hit the carpet with an ominous _thud_.

Steel-toed, absolutely.

“Would you put that out, please?” Tony says, jerking his chin toward the cigarette. “I’ve got a kid, you know? You can’t smoke around her.”

“I don’t smoke,” the bodyguard says.

“You are, right now, at this moment, smoking a cigarette,” Tony says.

The man huffs and takes the cigarette out of his mouth. “I was checking your fire security system.”

Tony forces himself to acknowledge the fact that pushing this guy backwards into the elevator shaft would probably constitute murder. And the subsequent prison sentence would leave Mia without any family at all.

“Put it out,” he says.

The bodyguard shrugs. “You got an ashtray, or did you just want me to swallow it?”

Tony opts not to answer that. The open elevator shaft is looking more and more inviting.

Barton would probably help him hide a body. He’s been downright solicitous for months, swinging by to drop off NERF guns and terrible t-shirts and brightly-sprinkled pastries for Mia every few days. Tony’s been thinking about asking him if he’d sign on as Mia’s alternate guardian after Rhodey. There are decent odds, after all, that whatever kills Tony is going to take Rhodey with it.

Of course, there are decent odds that whatever kills Tony and Rhodey is going to kill Clint, too.

“Come on,” Tony says, instead of attempting murder. “Let’s get through this interview.”

\- - -

The problem – the unfortunate, terrible, no-good, very bad _problem _– is that Jason Todd is by far the most qualified candidate for the position. In fact, he is, technically, the _only _qualified candidate for the position.

“Oh, I’m sure SHIELD’s fielded a whole litter of options, right?” Jason asks, when he’s sprawled out in the chair across from Tony’s desk, looking not even a little bit concerned about his employment prospects. “What’ve they got? Bunch of former spec ops assholes who think the Pledge of Allegiance counts as a lullaby? Some fucking SOG shitheads who haven’t had a splash fight since the last time they waterboarded a detainee? Give me a fucking break.”

Tony rolls his eyes from across the desk. He doesn’t smile. It’s more of a struggle than it should be. “This job has significant risks. Almost all of the candidates have military or law enforcement experience.”

Jason rolls his eyes right back. “You want to raise a kid or train a soldier? You hand that girl off to some SHIELD agent, and she’ll be active duty by age eighteen. Seventeen, if she comes up with a beta-level mutation or higher.”

“_Your _experience, of course,” Tony says, holding up the file, “is a bit less well-documented.”

Jason smirks at him. It’s offensive, is what it is. “You’ve got a complete employment history. I even had a friend declassify some of it for you.”

“I don’t actually need you to--- do you know what Steve Roger’s clearance level is?”

Jason tips his head back. “Rogers pulled the records for you? That’s sweet. You guys real close?”

Tony raises his eyebrows. “That’s an awfully personal question.”

“This is an awfully personal job,” Jason counters.

Tony drops the file on the desk. “You really expect me to believe that this is your full employment history? You show up, fresh from fucking nowhere as far as any database in the world can confirm, and you immediately get a job with _Batman_?”

Jason has quite a few smiles. This one shows teeth. “It was a hell of an interview.”

It must have been. Batman had called Tony himself. And hadn’t _that _been a hellishly bizarre phone call to take over breakfast? Batman, full cowl, frowning as always, brushing aside Tony’s alarmed questions to declare: “No, Stark. This isn’t business. This is personal. I heard you’re looking for a security team for your daughter. I have someone I’d like to recommend.”

And then, half an hour later, Charles Xavier called about the same thing, with the same name to offer.

“Jason Todd,” he’d said, with a rueful half-smile. “His manners are a bit rough, I’m afraid, but he’s excellent with children.”

The application had arrived shortly thereafter. Submitted properly through the formal channels and then also dropped casually onto Tony’s private server. Sent by Oracle, who’d attached a short note that read only: _No one’s better at this line of work. Sorry about his personality. We did all we could._

“You could always hire a team,” Jason tells him, off-hand, like he’s just thought of it. “An odd couple. Find some nice nanny, give her a SIG or three, and then see if the Punisher wants to come up and relive his parenting days. Guarantee you he’ll imprint like a Goddamn gosling.”

Tony stares at him. “You want me to hire _Frank Castle _to--”

“Absolutely not,” Jason says, waving him off. “That was a joke. Guy’s record is appalling. Had two kids, lost two kids. My record, by the way, is dead kid free. You should hire me.”

Tony doesn’t particularly want to. “I don’t like unknowns around my daughter.”

Jason considers him for a moment and then straightens up, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. For the first time, it looks like Tony has his full attention.

“Listen,” he says. “I’m the only person who does this. It’s me. I got two Robins to adulthood without so much as a single flatline. Half the active X-Men got de-aged to make them easy to kill, and I lost exactly none of them. I looked after Bumblebee’s daughter until the Titans got disbanded. I’ve been tracking at-risk mutant kids across the world for five years. All my kids are safe, Stark. They’re all still alive. You wanna hear about the ones who weren’t my job?”

Tony doesn’t need to. He ran the reports. He studied the headlines. He knows what happens to the families of people like him. He knows how much risk Mia is in, just for being his daughter.

He understands exactly why Maya never told him. He forgave her for it months ago.

“This is what I do,” Jason tells him. There’s an earnestness to him suddenly, some kind of conviction he’s trying to express. “You fuck around, saving the world. And I make sure nobody kills your kid.”

Tony fidgets with the file in front of him. He considers Jason for a long moment. The truth is, there really isn’t anyone else. But that doesn’t mean he’s pleased with the available options. “Your file didn’t list any mutations.”

“Because I’m not a mutant. I told you.”

“No one’s officially classified you as enhanced, either. Although Hank McCoy--”

“I’m not a metahuman.” Jason looks like he’s edging toward the end of his patience on this particular topic. “What point are you making?”

“You’ve been active for seventeen years. You look about twenty-five.”

“Thanks,” Jason says, deadpan. “I moisturize.”

Tony frowns. “I don’t like unknowns--”

“Around your kid, I know.” Jason leans back in his seat. He sighs, runs a hand through his hair. “Okay. Look. If you hire me – and you should, because, again, I’m the only one who does this shit – there’ll be things about me that you’re never gonna know. And that’s by design. That’s important. Because there’s always a chance that someday you’re gonna be the threat I’m protecting your kid from.”

Tony’s been fussing with the file, tapping it between his hands. He goes and thinks longingly of elevator shafts and Barton’s discreet body disposal skills. “What,” he says, as evenly as he can, “the hell are you accusing me of?”

“Nothing,” Jason says. He shrugs, holds his hands up. “You’re a superhero. People want you dead. Some of those people have abilities, some of them have money, and a lot of them are fundamentally fucked-up.”

Tony is not particularly mollified. “Sure. How does that make me a threat to my own daughter?”

Jason’s eyes cut away. He chews on his lip for a second and then takes a breath. “I once had a telepath put it into my client’s head that her four-year-old was some kind of demon. She tried to throw him off the roof. You ever play keep-away where the stakes are you win or a kid’s brains get splattered on a sidewalk twenty stories down?”

Tony swallows. He gets a flash of it, himself hurting Mia. Dragging her toward a roof. The heavy fingers of the Iron Man gauntlet closing around her small, delicate throat.

He feels like he’s going to be sick. He ignores it.

“Yeah,” Jason says, slowly. “Yeah, exactly. She’s not the only one. It’s happened twice. So there’s shit about me that’s not in any file, and there’s shit I won’t tell you, and that’s because you wear a giant suit of bulletproof armor, and, if I have to fight you, I’m gonna need a few surprises.”

Tony stares across the desk, at this man who thinks he has a chance against him, suited up and ready to fight. And he must, obviously, because both Robins are alive, and all those mutant kids are alive, and none of the de-aged X-Men got added to their sad cemetery. So there must be something about this man that Tony doesn’t know, something that makes him more dangerous than he seems.

“Xavier said you were good with kids,” Tony says. The longer he spends with Jason, the more absurd he finds the concept.

Jason’s expression shifts again, and he’s back to looking obnoxiously smug. “Sure,” he says. “I’m a regular Goddamn Mary Poppins.”

\- - -

Tony interviews four other candidates and then calls Batman. The Dark Knight answers immediately, and he must be in that subterranean bunker he prefers, because his skin glows with the light of a monitor’s screen.

“Stark,” he says. “Is there a problem?”

“Personal, not business,” Stark says.

“Hm.” There’s a brief pause. And then, “Did you hire Jason?”

Tony makes a face. “Do you know how weird it is to imagine you on first name basis with someone? We’ve known each other for five years, Bats. You’ve _never _called me by my first name.”

Batman stares at him. He does not seem impressed. Well, he never does. “I’ve known Jason for a very long time.”

“Which is _weird_,” Tony insists. “Which is – no offense – batshit. Because he’s kind of an unrepentant asshole, and God knows I think that’s a virtue more people should embrace, but _you--_”

“Interesting,” Batman says, cutting him off. “I thought he’d be nicer to you.”

Tony blinks. “Why would you think that?”

“Because you aren’t me.”

The thing about Batman, Tony decides, is that he’s kind of a diva. He tries to camouflage it with his clenched jaw and gravelly voice and crow’s feather color scheme, but, once you see past that, you realize only a truly theatrical personality type could pull off that amount of leather and interpersonal problems.

“So, uh,” Tony says, with a sort of _go on _gesture. “You gonna unpack any of that for me, or--”

“I don’t think I could be any clearer,” Batman says, which is Batman-speak for _Fuck you for asking a single clarifying question_. “If you’re calling me for my advice, you already have it.”

“All documentation on him begins at age eighteen, when you apparently decided to hire him as Robin’s nanny,” Tony says. “The guy doesn’t have a childhood.”

“No,” Batman says, blank-faced and even-toned. “He didn’t.”

“So he just sprung fully formed from your--”

“He’s the best,” Batman says. “Jason’s the best at what he does. He’s never lost a child. I know you opted to forgo a secret identity, Stark, but you have to understand that it’s a reality most of us live with. He’s entitled to his secrets. He is _worth _his secrets.”

“So you know who he really is?” Tony has trouble with things like this. Any informational roadblock is an affront to his dignity, an irritating, ever-irking insult. He has to _know_. “You know where he comes from?”

Batman stares at him. Tony watches, fascinated, as his already clenched jaw somehow wenches itself even tighter. “What I know, Stark,” he says, finally, “is that hiring someone else would be a mistake.”

And then, because he’s Batman, he ends the call, disappearing dramatically from Tony’s screen.

“Asshole,” Tony pronounces. Because he is, almost always. He is also, unfortunately, almost always right.

He pulls up a camera feed, checks in on Mia. She’s right where she was half an hour ago, curled up asleep in her room, hair fanned across her pillow. Her arms are curled tight around the stuffed Hulk that Barton gave her a month or so ago.

She looks so fragile. She always does.

For the six months she’s been here, the Avengers have been trading off on babysitting duty. Sometimes, when things are particularly cataclysmic, Mia stays with Happy or Pepper while the all-assembled team takes off.

There have been threats. Mia could only stay a secret for so long. Tony wasn’t going to lock her away in the Tower forever. She’s a sweet kid. Brave, and curious. She likes parks and museums and every carnival ride that will accept someone of her stature. She likes piggyback rides and flying. She likes when Barton juggles for her, or when Natasha braids her hair, or when Steve sketches something for her to color.

She’s terrified of big dogs, but she’ll pet them if Tony holds her hand.

Any grown human – meta or otherwise, mutant or not – could snap her neck in half a second. Sometimes Tony can’t sleep because his brain is too busy outlining all the thousands of ways she could die.

He needs to hire someone. Someone who can be around her when he isn’t, who will look after her when he can’t. Someone who understands the importance of the job.

_Two Robins_, he thinks. _Bumblebee’s daughter. Half the active X-Men, and dozens of mutant kids. _

Maybe it’s enough.

\- - -

He asks Hill in the morning. He’s ostensibly at SHIELD to do some consulting on their quinjet upgrades, but the work’s simple enough that he can prioritize more pressing matters. “Some guy named Jason Todd,” he says. “Possibly enhanced? Works as a bodyguard.”

“Oh,” Hill says, with decided emphasis. “Todd. Yes, we’re familiar.”

Tony doesn’t look up from the screen. He spins the schematics around, zooms in. Someone, he notices, has done something particularly clever with the cloaking system. He’ll have to track down that engineer, see if they can be lured to more temperate climes.

“Got any gossip to share with the class?” Tony asks, when it becomes clear that Hill isn’t going to elaborate without prodding.

“He wasn’t on the list of candidates we sent over,” Hill says.

“Noticed that,” Tony says. “There a reason why?”

Several seconds slide by in silence and then Hill sighs. “He doesn’t work for us.”

Tony had actually been able to deduce that tidbit for himself after a casual perusal of SHIELD’s personnel files. But Hill, who can be stunningly direct when the mood strikes her, likes to be circuitous about information she thinks Tony doesn’t need. Generally, the information she thinks Tony doesn’t need is information that reflects negatively on SHIELD.

“The sting of rejection still a little fresh, Agent Hill?”

There’s another bout of silence. This one feels indignant. “We don’t trust people who don’t trust us.”

Jason Todd’s SHIELD file consists mostly of information aggregated from the FBI, the CIA, INTERPOL, and the extra-shadowy branch of the government that’s been tracking supers and metahumans for the past fifteen years. The only SHIELD-specific information the file contained was a note that stated: _Approach not recommended. If necessary, send Phil Coulson. _

Phil Coulson, of course, is dead. So that particular line of information went nowhere.

“This whole organization is a horrorshow of spooks, Hill,” Tony says. “I’ve seen the notes on the breakroom fridges. Nobody in this place trusts anybody else.”

Hill’s boots clatter a little as she crosses the room. He can’t tell if she’s making noise to avoid startling him or if she’s actually annoyed enough to be careless. She stops by his chair, leaning her hip against the desk as she reaches over his shoulder to tap at the screen until she backs him out of the project’s associated personnel logs.

“Stop headhunting,” Hill says. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to find engineers with the skills we need who are willing to work for a government salary?”

Tony cobbles together a contrite expression. “Whoops.”

Hill rolls her eyes. She gets his screen resituated on the quinet and then double-taps the aerospike engines. “Here’s where we need you,” she reminds me.

“Hill,” he says, “you need me everywhere.”

She snorts and pulls back, giving him space to work without fully disengaging. “I’m serious about those engineers, Stark. We can’t pay them what you can, but they’re needed here.”

“Is that why Todd wouldn’t work for you?” he asks, looking up at her. “You couldn’t pay him enough?”

Hill frowns, eyes moving up like she’s remembering a particularly disastrous interview. Tony can empathize. “No,” she says, after a moment. “I really don’t think it had anything to do with the money.”

\- - -

Tony brings Jason back for a follow-up interview at the end of the week. This time, he meets him in the lobby to avoid any elevator-related chicanery. Jason wanders in with a motorcycle helmet under one arm, smiling beatifically in the face of the security guard’s visible side-eye. 

He’s wearing combat boots and a leather jacket and a gray Gotham Blades t-shirt. His jeans are worn-in and too tight across the thighs and not _quite _fraying at the knees. Tony can’t decide if he’s dismayed or impressed by the realization that the last interview’s sartorial choices had apparently been Todd’s attempt at business attire.

“Safety first?” Tony asks, gesturing at the helmet.

“Safety _always_,” Jason tosses back, with another showy smile for the guard.

The lobby staff take Jason’s helmet and jacket, and then Tony leads him on a tour of the upper-floors and then the basement levels. Jason isn’t visibly impressed by anything until they get to the workshop, where he proceeds to make some gratifyingly enthralled noises at Tony’s cars and motorcycles.

“Mine’s custom,” Jason says, when he’s crouched over Tony’s modified Ninja HR2, cooing at it like it’s a puppy.

“Custom what?” Tony asks, fishing for a make or model.

Jason looks up at him and flashes a grin. And that’s a new one, a smile Tony hasn’t seen before. A little crooked, like he’s losing a fight to hold it back. “Custom,” he says again, like it’s a complete sentence.

“You built your own bike?” Tony asks. There hadn’t been anything in Jason’s files about mechanical expertise. “From what?”

Jason shrugs and slides to his feet. His hands go in his pockets, and his grin takes on definite shit-eating undertones. “My buddy built it for me,” he says. “As a gift. He had a surprise daughter situation, kinda like you did. I helped him with the adjustment period.”

“Surprise daughter,” Tony repeats.

“Not uncommon.” Jason says, exhibiting an alarming degree of nonchalance, given the subject matter. “Sleeping with a superhero is one thing. Having a kid with one? Most people try to suspend the baby death sentence for as long as possible.”

“Jesus,” Tony says. They’d been having a nice tour, a pleasant bit of bike shop talk, and now this asshole comes at him with _baby death sentence_.

Jason frowns, maybe a little apologetic, and reaches up to rub at the back of his neck. “It is what it is, Stark. And you’re smart enough to know that, or you wouldn’t be interviewing ex-SEALS for your six-year-old’s security team.”

“Ex-SEALS,” Tony says, “and one Robin nanny.”

“Hm,” Jason says, humming it a bit. “Yeah, that’s me.” There’s nothing especially self-effacing about his body language, but there’s a tilt to his mouth that seems like he’s holding back a laugh. “Gotham’s only professional birdwatcher.”

Tony doesn’t want to hire him. He wants a full timeline, an exhaustive list of skills and experience and education. He wants to know where he came from. He wants to know if he can be bought, if he can be turned, if he can be scared.

“Batman says you’re the best at what you do,” Tony says.

An expression of barely restrained incredulity crosses Jason’s face. “‘At what I do,’” he repeats. “God, what an asshole.”

It startles a smile out of Tony. To be fair, Batman _is _an asshole. “He also said hiring someone else would be a mistake.”

Jason shrugs, hands still in his pockets. His Gotham Blades t-shirt stretches across his impressive shoulders. With his arms bare like that, Tony can see old scars traced across his skin. Long thin lines across the blades of his forearms, souvenirs from what might have been a hell of a knife fight or just a bad day with Wolverine, and something that is very clearly an old burn scar across the back of his left elbow.

He looks so young, is the thing. Young and handsome and smugly at-home in his own torn-up and patched-together skin.

_Seventeen years of this work_, Tony thinks. There’s no one else with anything like his record.

“A trial,” he says, because Xavier and Batman have been doing this work longer than him, but Mia’s the most important thing Tony’s ever been responsible for. And he’s saved the whole world. “One month. And then we’ll see about hiring you permanently.”

Jason shifts in place, and Tony thinks, for a moment, that he’s going to be offended. But the look he gets is patient, and warmer than any other look Jason’s thrown his way so far. “Sure,” he says. “A month.”


	3. Chapter 2

When Jason is hired – _if _he’s hired – he’ll move into the Tower. For now, he’s staying somewhere nearby and commuting in every morning. Tony meets him in the lobby again on the first day, and Jason submits to the apparently nigh-unbearable indignity of a keycard.

“Jesus, Stark,” Jason says, as he flips the card between his fingers, toying with it like a bored cardshark. “Why don’t you just put a GPS collar on me? You don’t have to pretty things up for me. I know what this is.”

There’s no reason to suspect that that card’s anything other than a piece of plastic with a magstripe, a chip, a picture, and a list of relevant personal details. It’s exactly as thin and flexible as a driver’s license. The GPS beacon is incredibly small and well-hidden, undetectable by touch or weight or sight. It’s still at least four years ahead of anything available on the civilian market. 

Tony has similar beacons in the heels of every one of Mia’s shoes. There’s a card in Happy’s wallet, and Pepper has one, too. Lately, he’s been thinking about hiding them in the next round of gear updates for the Avengers.

But there’s no proof of any of that.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tony says, because he’s not going to get into a whole discussion about the merits of personal privacy with Jason. Not at 8am in the morning. Not when he still can’t track down any documentation of Jason Todd even being alive before he arrived in Gotham to start working for Batman. “And don’t ever come to work in any kind of collar. I have a kid now. I don’t need that kind of press.”

Jason rolls his eyes and then shoves the card into his front pocket. He’s wearing jeans again, but they fit better than they last ones, and they’re newer, don’t have any holes or rips or signs of wear. He’s wearing a white t-shirt and a black hoodie, and he has a SIG Sauer P229 in a holster in the small of his back.

Jason brought a Glock 19 to his second interview, tucked into a holster at his side. Tony wonders about the change.

But he waits until they’re in the private elevator headed up to the penthouse before he brings it up. “So,” he says. “A SIG, huh?”

The look Jason gives him is deliberately patient. “You keep x-raying me,” he says, “and I’m gonna start wearing a lead apron, Stark. What the fuck. I’m gonna get cancer.”

“It’s a millimeter wave scanner,” Tony says. “You’re not going to get cancer. Let me see it.”

Jason’s expression bends slightly less patient. “Kinda sounds like you’ve already seen every part of me there is to see. If you sell those pictures online, I get a cut.”

“They’re really not sexy.” Tony holds his hand out. “I want to see the gun.”

“Of course they’re sexy,” Jason says, as he reaches behind his back, apparently willing to oblige with the request as long as he can complain about it the entire time. “They’re pictures of _me_.”

Tony takes the gun when it’s offered and looks it over. Whatever Jason might be, however lax his standards of care are when it comes to his sartorial choices, he takes very, very good care of his weapons.

He also makes interesting ammunition choices for a man who’s allegedly never served in the military or law enforcement.

“Too fancy for 9mm?” Tony asks, as he hands the gun back.

Jason shrugs, re-holstering the SIG with a professional ease that provokes dissonant feelings of comfort and disquiet. Tony likes the idea that Jason knows how to handle a gun. He hates the idea that he might ever need to.

“I like a little bit of flash,” Jason says, offhand, as if he expects Tony to believe that the only difference between 9mm and .357 SIG cartridges is _a little bit of flash_.

“Bit of a kick,” Tony muses, stepping out of the elevator.

Jason follows, a little behind and to the side, scrubbing at his hair one-handed and then yawning into his elbow. “Lower mag capacity, too,” he says. “Harder on the gun.” He’s smiling, just a little, like he thinks this conversation is funny. Like he’s not particularly worried about the point Tony’s making.

“Faster bullets,” Tony offers. He studies Jason for a second, tries to gauge him. “Better accuracy. If you know what you’re doing.”

Jason shrugs again. His smile’s just getting wider.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Tony asks, since Jason doesn’t seem inclined to volunteer that information.

Jason laughs. Right in his face. Bright and cheerful and amused, the way a normal person would laugh if Tony asked them if they knew what colors were or what sound sheep make. Like he thinks it’s charming, too harmless to be insulting. “Stark,” he says, “are we pretending you haven’t pulled every video there is on me?”

He has. Of course he has. But the footage is all grainy cell-phone shots, mostly taken by Gothamites years back, when Jason was still tagging after Robin. And Jason hadn’t used his guns very often back then.

“You know,” Tony says, “about those videos. About Gotham.”

“Hm?” Jason says. They’re in the penthouse, standing in the kitchen, and Jason’s making covetous eyes at the burbling coffeepot. He has his hands tucked into the pockets of his zip-up hoodie. He looks sleepy and comfortable, not especially threatening, but there’s that holstered SIG and two separate knives hidden in his clothes.

And Tony’s watched the footage. He’s read all of the reports. He knows that Jason Todd is, allegedly, incredibly dangerous without any weapons at all.

“I just find it interesting,” Tony says, “that all the reports out of Gotham say your shots were nonlethal. You carry a gun like that, load it like that, and then you get mean about shoulders and kneecaps.”

Jason starts opening cabinets while Tony watches, nonchalantly searching the place until he finds the coffee mugs. “That was Batman’s rule,” he says. “Not mine.”

He grabs one mug and then swipes another, holds it up toward Tony with a raised eyebrow until Tony nods. And then he grabs the coffeepot, pours both of them coffee while he pitches his voice down into an impressively accurate impersonation of Batman’s gravelly voice. “No killing in Gotham,” he says.

“No killing the people who’re trying to kill the kids you keep taking out to fight crime?” Tony asks, eyebrows up. He takes the coffee Jason hands him, watches the way Jason leans back against the kitchen counter, eyes slipping closed as he sips at his coffee.

“What an asshole, huh?” Jason says. His eyes snap open a moment later, pinning Tony in place, focused and intent in a way he usually isn’t. “You’re more of a pragmatist, right?”

Tony’s not sure that’s what he’d call it. But he’s been in the business of war his entire life. He loads the Iron Man suits with nonlethal rounds, but they aren’t the primary ammunition. “If someone takes shots at my kid,” he says, “I’d prefer they never do it again.”

Jason nods, gesture sharp, eyes serious. “Right?” he says, like it’s a question, like he’s seeking some kind of validation. And then, a second later, there’s a complicated flick of emotions that settle into nothing. He takes another, longer sip of his coffee. “Jesus,” he says, cradling the cup to his chest. “This is good.”

\- - -

Tony has done his best to explain Jason to Mia. They had a whole talk about it. Several talks, actually. Happy helped, because Mia loves Happy, and she loves that Happy’s job is to help keep Tony safe. She worries about things like that. Not so much for herself. But her mother’s death has left her with lingering worries about Tony’s own potential demise.

When Tony introduces Jason to Mia, he gives her the abridged explanation again, just to really cement things in her mind. He’s a helper, Tony says. Like Happy, or Miss Potts. He’s here to help Mia stay on schedule, to travel with her, to make sure everyone around her behaves. He’s here to keep her safe when Tony’s gone. When the others are gone, too.

Jason weathers the explanation with a tolerant if vaguely unimpressed expression. Tony wonders, when he meets Jason’s eyes, if he actually, legitimately expected Tony to look his sweet six-year-old daughter in the eyes and say, _Hey, Mia, people want to kill you. And this disgruntled, sarcastic, scary son of a bitch is here to make sure they don’t. He’s here to make sure they die instead. _

But Jason doesn’t argue the point. He just crouches down when Tony’s done, one knee to the carpet, and offers Mia his hand. “Hey, Mia,” he says.

And it’s not that he transforms, because he doesn’t. He doesn’t even shake off all those edges he carries with him. But they’re blunted, somehow, but the tone of his voice and the smile on his face and the easy, relaxed way he’s holding himself.

Tony remembers that Jason had once claimed to be _a regular Goddamn Mary Poppins_. And that’s not what he is. But, in this moment, he looks very different from the surly asshole who’d announced his arrival in Tony’s life by smoking in an elevator shaft.

“Hi, Mr. Jason,” Mia says, reaching out carefully to shake his hand. She’s big on manners, his kid. She likes to emulate JARVIS, who is possibly her sixth favorite person on the planet, after Tony, and Rhodey, and Happy, and Pepper, and Clint.

Jason scrunches up his face at the formality, makes a big, empathetic gesture like he’s suddenly become a cartoon character. “Wow,” he says. “Good manners. But you can call me Jay.”

Mia hesitates. “Okay,” she says, after a moment. She seems a little uncertain, and her eyes drift questioningly to Tony. She’s smart enough to know that routines don’t change without reason, and Jason represents a significant shift in her fairly isolated life.

Jason rocks back on his heel, tips his head to the side, and considers her for a moment. And then, out of nowhere, he willingly offers up details of a heretofore unmentioned personal talent. “Hey, Mia,” he says, “I can walk on my hands.”

Mia blinks. Her eyes snap back to Jason. “Oh,” she says, cautiously enthused, “Uncle Clint can do that.”

Mia has a habit of calling all the Avengers by family titles. Clint and Rhodey are her uncles, and Natasha is an aunt, and Bruce and Thor are her cousins, and Steve, hilariously, is her grandpa. Despite rumors to the contrary, Tony didn’t prompt or promote this behavior. He does his best not to think about why she’d feel the need to construct an elaborate family around her. That, he figures, is a job for the therapist she sees once a week.

Jason doesn’t flinch at _Uncle Clint. _He just smiles encouragingly. “Yeah?” he asks. “Can he do this?”

And then Jason tips forward, no lead up or momentum, and suddenly he’s on his hands. He’s a Goddamn showoff, is what he is. He prances around the living room like a circus performer, hops onto the coffee table like gravity is for other people. At one point, apparently insulted by Mia’s cheerful recounting of Clint Barton’s thrilling acrobatic endeavors, he does a one-handed, upside-down push-up while juggling.

And that’s the moment Tony loses his daughter to the Jason Todd Fan Club.

It’s a tragedy, is what it is. He’d been hoping Mia would save him from this mess.

All she had to do was develop a sudden and severe dislike of Jason Todd, and then Tony could pitch him out of his insultingly muscular ass and hire one of the fully-vetted, lesser-qualified SHIELD candidates. But Mia, for the first time in the entirety of her history upon the earth, exhibits absolutely appalling taste and adores Jason, instead.

“Great,” Tony says, afterward. “So you’re a shameless showoff. You sure you’re interested in this line of work? I hear Cirque du Soleil is hiring.”

Jason looks slightly flushed from spending nearly a quarter of an hour upside down, but he doesn’t have the decency to look even vaguely winded from all his obnoxious acrobatics. He just finger-combs his hair back into place and smirks.

“You’ve got a sweet kid, Stark,” he says. “She takes after her mom, huh?”

\- - -

Steve, Nat, and Clint are allegedly running an intel op in Bangladesh, so Tony figures he’s entirely within his rights to be surprised when they show up at the Tower about an hour before dinnertime. Jason’s still around, sitting cross-legged on the carpet with Mia, exactly like someone whose joints aren’t aging on a regular human timetable. The two of them are working out some incredibly complex diplomatic relations between Mia’s My Little Ponies and Jason’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

“Yeah, but Mia,” Jason says, as JARVIS politely announces cleared visitors, “ponies don’t even _like _sewers.”

There’s an interesting moment when the elevator doors slide open. It’s interesting for a lot of reasons.

JARVIS has cleared the elevator. No one gets in that elevator without clearance from JARVIS, and, if they somehow manage it, the elevator won’t move. And if they climbed in the elevator shaft or somehow overrode JARVIS’ control of the elevator, the doors won’t open on the penthouse level without permission from JARVIS and Tony. Jason no doubt knows all of that, and has since his first interview. He did, after all, try to bypass every single one of those protections.

So there’s a degree of implied safety in the fact that the elevator is moving at all. That safety is underlined by the fact that JARVIS is aware of it, that he _announced _it. And then there’s Tony’s non-reaction as he sits on the couch, working on a tablet, not even bothering to look up until Jason’s movement catches his eye.

Because, as the elevator doors open, Jason, still outlining a pony’s natural aversion to mildew-y, rat-infested subterranean waterways, puts Donatello on the coffee table and reaches his right hand back, bracing it on the floor behind him like he’s stabilizing himself.

But his posture doesn’t change. There’s no weight on that hand. It’s inches away from the gun at his back, and he’s angling his body, ready to shift. And, if he does, he’ll be drawing his gun and shielding Mia.

It’s Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, and Clint Barton. When the doors open, they’re standing there, relaxed and calm. Nonthreatening.

Beside him, Mia crows “_Uncle Clint_!” and scrambles to her feet.

Clint bounces out of the elevator, Steve a half-step behind. Jason and Natasha lock eyes for half a second, and then she moves forward, hands open at her sides, and Jason finally shifts weight onto that back hand, uses it to lever himself to his feet.

It’s a handful of seconds. It’s the _Avengers_.

_Jesus Christ_, Tony thinks.

“Oh man,” Clint says, scooping Mia off the ground, “is that Pinkie Pie with a bow?”

“It’s you!” Mia tells him. Tony supposes she has her reasons, although he’s still not entirely sure why Bruce gets to be Fluttershy and he has to be Twilight fucking Sparkle.

Clint beams at the pony figurine, visibly delighted by the compound bow Tony 3D-printed and taped to its back a couple days ago. “Kiddo,” he says, earnestly, “I have never received a higher compliment. I mean it. In my entire life.”

There’s a bit of a bustle after that, because Mia has important developments to recount to both Natasha and Steve, which can apparently only be delivered from Steve’s shoulders and Natasha’s arms respectively, and then Tony has to introduce the majority of his team to the pistol-carrying smartass he hired to protect his only child.

“So,” he says, “this is Jason. He’s helping with Mia.”

They know, of course, that he’s been looking for a bodyguard. Natasha and Clint helped him review the SHIELD files. Steve personally requested intel on Jason from half a dozen government agencies.

“Hi,” Steve says, very politely. “I’m Steve Rogers.”

The handshake that passes between them appears, on its surface, to be entirely polite. Jason doesn’t flinch or shake his hand out afterwards. But Tony makes a mental note to ask JARVIS what the psi on Steve’s handshake was, because Steve doesn’t set his jaw like that unless he’s making some kind of point.

“Hey,” Jason says. “Nice to meet you.” He doesn’t sound any more respectful or awed when he’s meeting Captain Americ than he ever has when he’s talked to Tony. For no reason whatsoever, Tony finds that incredibly endearing.

“Jay can walk on his hands, too,” Mia says, tugging on Clint’s hand and grinning up at him.

“Oh yeah?” Clint asks. And Tony didn’t expect _Clint Barton _to be the disagreeable one, but he’s eyeing Jason like he just said something offensive about Clint’s grandmother in a dive bar.

“Yeah!” Mia says. “He’ll show you. You just gotta ask.”

“Show and tell,” Clint says. “Awesome. Tony has a gym a couple floors down.”

“Guys,” Tony says, deciding that it might be time to get off the couch.

“Lockers,” Natasha adds, thoughtfully. “Showers. A boxing ring.”

“Alright,” Steve says. He has hands on his hips. He’s _Captain America_-ing right at them, but the two of them don’t flinch. Usually, Tony finds that much funnier than he does right now. Usually, when the murder twins are feeling feisty, they aren’t terrorizing one of his employees.

_Potential _employee. Tony doesn’t even know if Jason’s officially on the insurance yet.

Jason, for his part, is starting to smile. He tips his chin down, bites into the corner of his mouth. There’s a moment where Tony wonders exactly what kind of verbal gymnastics Jason’s going to do in order to tell them to fuck off in an appropriate family-friendly manner, but then Jason opens his mouth and says, “Okay, yeah. Sure. Show me.”

“Alright,” Tony says, feeling like he’s somehow lost control of the situation. “You know he’s not a SHIELD intern, right? He’s got nothing to do with the two of you, and I need him in one piece. Do you have any idea how complicated the IRS paperwork is for him? I’m not re-filing for a new hire.”

“You never even saw the paperwork, Stark,” Barton says, with a frankly offensive roll of his eyes. “Come on.”

“No,” Tony says, because of course he hadn’t. “But Pepper heard about it, which means _I _heard about it. I don’t want to have to hear about it twice. My time is important.”

The look Natasha gives him is tolerant, and stubborn. She crouches down to Mia’s level and smiles. “Mia,” she says, “Clint and I are going to borrow Jason for a little bit, okay?”

Mia glances between the three of them. “But,” she says, rescuing Pinkie Pie from Clint’s grasp, “we were playing ponies.”

Natasha takes that under consideration and then reaches over and drags Steve in close. “You know who’s great at ponies?” she says. “Steve.”

Steve blinks. “Uh,” he says.

“Good luck, Cap,” Jason says. He claps Steve on the shoulder, and Tony won’t have any proof until JARIVS runs the reports later, but he thinks, judging from the way it rocks Steve the tiniest bit on his feet, that it counts as retribution for the handshake earlier.

“Okay,” Tony says. “Seriously. Seriously, Jason, you know this isn’t necessary. Right? You do know that?”

Jason shrugs. He moves toward the elevator with an easy nonchalance that Tony feels is really uncalled for, given the situation he’s wandering into. “Sure,” he says, shoving his hands back in the pockets of his hoodie. “But who doesn’t like a bit of competitive acrobatics?”

Natasha and Clint saunter into the elevator, posting up on either side of Jason, and Tony would feel bad for him, but, honestly, he already gave Jason every possible opportunity to back out.

“Do we even have your will on file?” Tony calls out, as the elevator doors start to close.

Jason laughs, sharp and sudden, flashes a grin. “Batman has it,” he says, and then the doors close, and he disappears down to the gym with a pair of master assassins.

Tony takes a deep breath and wonders how bad it would be, really, to have a SHIELD agent in his house, indoctrinating his child before she can read.

Mia, deprived of her second favorite uncle and new best friend, settles back on the floor and begins resituating her toys. She doesn’t even try to involve Steve. Well, he’s hopeless.

Steve wanders over to stand hesitantly between the two of them, eyes darting from pony to turtle like he thinks he’s going to be called upon to send them into battle.

Tony maintains his composure for what he feels is a truly admirable three minutes. And then, with a sigh, he swipes his tablet off the couch. “Hey, Steve,” he says. He holds up the tablet, waggles it in the air. “You wanna see?”

“Yep,” Steve says, headed his way immediately. “Yeah, absolutely.”

Tony double-taps the tablet, wakes JARVIS up. “Hey, J,” he says. “Run the camera feed from the gym.”


	4. Chapter 3

Down in the gym, Clint and Natasha are lounging against the ropes of the boxing ring, and Jason’s nowhere to be seen. Tony spends a minute or so wondering if he should check the elevator for a body before Jason emerges from the locker room, wearing workout clothes he must have liberated from Clint’s locker.

The shorts are entirely too tight across Jason’s thighs, and the face Clint makes when he notices is not as charitable as Tony thinks those thighs deserve. It’s not Jason’s fault that Clint skips leg day at every possible opportunity.

“What’re you watching?” Mia asks, abandoning the diplomatic quagmire of pony vs turtle negotiations.

Her eyes are suspicious as they dart between the two of them. Usually, when Tony and Steve huddle over a tablet like this, they’re deciphering bad news, assessing threat levels, and organizing a response. Usually, a sight like this would lead to one or both of them leaving her to go fight.

He doesn’t like lying to her, but he can’t at that exact moment think of a kid-friendly way to say, _We’re about to watch your favorite aunt and uncle beat the absolute shit out of your new bff in some kind of non-HR approved hazing ritual. _

“It’s a commercial,” Tony tells her, because no amount of media training or spin coaching could prepare him for moments like this. “For laundry detergent.”

“Oh,” she says. She pins Steve with a skeptical stare, probably because she knows Steve’s the weaker link. Steve can lie to government officials and megalomaniacal mutants all damn day, but Mia’s baby face can pick him apart in seconds.

Steve, ever the strategist, compensates for his own weakness by refusing to make eye-contact. The bravest man Tony knows, and here he is, hiding from a six-year-old. Not that Tony blames him.

“Fascinating,” Steve says, wrapping his hand around his chin and obscuring his mouth, doing his best to hide his smile. “Look, Stark. Stain-lifting effect.”

“Wow,” Tony says, because Rogers is doing his best. “And an eco-friendly formula.”

“Innovative,” Steve says.

And _innovative _is certainly fitting, because what they’re watching on the entirely too-small screen of the tablet is damn near groundbreaking. In the sense that it’s an incredibly impressive display of skill, and also in the sense that this casual brawl might legitimately break Tony’s boxing ring.

Natasha and Clint start casually enough, throwing out punches Tony could’ve dodged pre-Afghanistan. And then, signaled either by the lazy way Jason weaves around them or the frankly disrespectful elbow he nudges into Clint’s ribs, they go from_ Friendly civilian meeting _to _SHIELD-sanctioned deathmatch _in approximately .05 seconds.

Jason falters and then feints and then backflips clear across the ring. He’s laughing when he lands. He’s still laughing when he charges them. After that, it’s difficult to keep up with what any individual person is doing.

“JARVIS,” Tony murmurs, careful to keep his volume below Mia-decipherable levels. “What are we looking at?”

The video feed from the gym shrinks to the side, and a sidebar opens up to the right as JARVIS analyzes Jason’s fight pattern. Tony and Steve watch in silence while Nat, Clint, and Jason whirl around the ring, and then data starts filtering in.

Under a list titled _Recognized styles_, JARVIS helpfully catalogues Judo, Karate, Krav Maga, Muay Thai, and Savate. _Potential styles_ is populated with Aikido, Capoeira, Silat, and Taekwondo. After a particularly interesting maneuver that begins when Natasha winds an arm around Jason’s throat and ends when he spins through a head throw to shake her lose, Aikido is upgraded to _Recognized_. A sudden spat of closely-exchanged jabs concludes with an unpleasant-looking uppercut, and _Boxing_ gets added onto the _Recognized styles _list with _In-fighter_ in parentheses.

“Oh,” Steve says, with a reluctantly impressed eyebrow. “So he’s just a hobbyist, huh?”

“Super casual,” Tony agrees. “Definitely. Probably just in it for the cardio.”

On the screen, Natasha launches into a thigh-first maneuver that Tony’s seen break hearts, minds, and necks. Clint helpfully sweeps Jason’s ankles at the same time, which brings all three of them crashing to the floor. Shortly thereafter, JARVIS adds Brazilian Jiu-jitsu to the list of potential fighting styles.

“Is the commercial over?” Mia asks. She’s in the vicinity of pouting now. She’s sensitive to being excluded. Given Tony’s own intolerance, he thinks she comes by that honestly.

“Almost, kiddo,” Tony promises. “Hey, why don’t you and JARVIS figure out what we should order for dinner?”

The answering sigh is only slightly theatrical, and Mia gamely swivels to face the nearest visible camera. Tony’s been coaching her to look people in the eye when she speaks to them. As far as he can tell, it never once occurred to her that JARVIS might not qualify.

On the screen, JARVIS has created another list. _Potential influences_.

Batman is at the very top, with 93% certainty. Clustered below him, ranging from 90-70%, are Nightwing, Lady Shiva, Red Robin, Robin, Batwoman, Batgirl, and Wolverine. The All Caste and the League of Assassins make the list, along with Arsenal, Bumblebee, and Kitty Pryde.

When the fight finally winds down, fifteen full minutes after it begun, JARVIS adds Black Widow and Hawkeye to the list of potential influences, with 5% certainty.

“Quick learner,” Steve says.

“Adaptive,” Tony counters. “If it sticks, he learned.”

Either way, it’s a hell of a showing.

Tony remembers what Batman told him. _Jason’s the best at what he does. _

It’s only now that he’s seen Jason work, now that he’s watched him hold his own against two Avengers, that it occurs to him to wonder why Jason chose this line of work instead of suiting up himself.

\- - -

Jason, Clint, and Natasha saunter off the elevator in plain clothes, with their hair wet from showers and the loose-jointed, comfortable body language of friends coming back from a day at the spa. The murder twins, Tony knows, have a hell of a way of getting to know new people. But he’s never seen them meet anyone who takes so many punches to the face without taking a single one personally. 

“You know,” Clint says, as he runs a towel through his hair one-handed and catches a flying Mia with the other. “You kinda look familiar. Did I know you when you were younger?”

Jason doesn’t miss a step, but a smirk hooks up one corner of his mouth. He’s smug, and relaxed. It’s a good look for him. Tony very deliberately chooses not to look for too long.

“We have a mutual friend,” Jason tells him.

Clint tips his head, hefting Mia up onto one hip and then dropping his wet towel on her head. She squawks in mock-indignation and flails in protest, and Clint pretends to fumble her until she settles down again.

“So I guess I’m not getting a name?” he asks, with the easy acceptance of a veteran spy who understands the necessity of secrets.

“Nope,” Jason says, tapping down that smirk.

If they knew their mutual acquaintance by the same name, it seems likely that they could share it. The problem, Tony figures, is that Clint knows one of Jason’s superhero acquaintances by their non-superhero identity, or maybe the other way around. Which is interesting, because, as far as Tony knows, the only people Clint knows outside of SHIELD are the tenants in his apartment and the people from his circus days.

Well, and Barney. But they already know all about Barney, and, from the two times Tony’s met him, he hasn’t seemed like the kind of guy who would inspire much loyalty in someone like Jason.

“But I definitely met you,” Clint says, slow and thoughtful, feeling it out.

“You saw me,” Jason confirms, which is not the same as meeting. And then, a second later, “It’s not important.”

“Kinda feels important,” Clint says. His tone is still friendly, but there’s some of that Hawkeye mid-mission watchfulness in his eyes.

Jason shrugs. His hair curls when it’s wet, lies across his forehead. He looks entirely too at-ease for a man who’s less than one full day into the job and has already been physically thrown across the length of a boxing ring. “It really doesn’t matter,” he says. “That was a whole other life.”

There’s a weight to the way he says it. _A whole other life_.

It doesn’t sound the way it does when Natasha talks about the life she lived before Clint found her. It doesn’t even sound the way Tony feels when he thinks about himself before Afghanistan. There’s a bitterness to the way Jason says it, sure, but a nostalgia that overpowers it. Like the life he left was the better one.

Which is the opposite of the way Tony feels.

Tony tries to imagine what that would feel like. He decides he doesn’t want to.

\- - -

Jason leaves a few minutes before the delivery guy shows up with enough food for Mia and half the Avengers. Tony invites him to stay, but Jason declines, offering up preexisting dinner plans as an excuse. Tony has JARVIS track the GPS beacon in Jason’s keycard, but the trail goes cold almost immediately, when Jason apparently scales to the very top of a neighboring building and stashes the card on the roof before disappearing.

“Slippery guy,” Clint says, with something like approval.

They’re all crowded around the bank of screens in Tony’s office, going over the footage Tony’s acquired of Jason over the past couple of weeks. They even dragged Bruce out of the lab for this, and Tony is doing his best to be gracious about the fact that they all collectively elected themselves fight critics while Tony was busy rereading _Pete the Cat _until Mia begrudgingly fell asleep.

“This is great, guys,” Tony tells them. “I really appreciate it. Hey, did it occur to any of you that I might have vetted him myself?”

“Yes,” Natasha says. “Which is why we didn’t bother trying to chase down anything digital.”

Clint shrugs. He’s shoveling pasta into his mouth without looking away from the screens. “He’s been fighting a long time. Since he was young, yeah?”

That last part is apparently directed at Natasha, because she does something complicated with her eyebrows and then slowly nods. “Still hits like he has something to prove,” she says.

“I just mean,” Clint says, and he drops his fork so he can gesture with his hands. Tony wouldn’t say that the gesture is particularly eloquent or helpful, but he appreciates that Clint apparently means it enough to temporarily halt his late night pasta massacre. “You back him into a corner, and he gets mean. Don’t think he even realizes it.”

“Hm,” Natasha says. She reaches up, fingers moving across the nearest screen. When she double-taps Batman’s name, JARVIS splits the screen, runs footage of Jason on the left and Batman on the right. All five of them watch as the two figures execute the same exact flip, from jump to landing. JARVIS cycles through clips, from the gym video to grainy Gotham recordings, showing the two of them in sequence. It’s almost eerie, how many times they line up perfectly.

“Well,” Bruce says, “you said he started in Gotham, right?”

“Sprang fully formed from the gutters of Gotham at age eighteen,” Tony confirms. “As far as anyone can prove, anyway.”

Natasha makes a dismissive noise. “As far as anyone can prove online.”

“Someone raised him,” Clint says.

“Someone _trained _him,” Natasha counters.

Out of everyone in the room, Natasha’s the reigning expert on being trained instead of raised. Tony chews on his lip.

“Okay,” Steve says, eyes on the screens. “So if this guy’s one of us, why isn’t he one of us?”

Tony raises his eyebrows. “Getting a little loose with your metaphors there, Cap. What makes him one of us?”

“He trains with people like us.” Steve swipes away the images of Batman. A second later he taps Nightwing and Wolverine. They watch the acrobatic flair Jason borrowed from Nightwing, the efficient brutality of the moves he learned from Wolverine. “He works for people like us. He fights the people we fight.”

“But only sometimes,” Natasha says. She has her head tipped to the side like she’s considering something. She and Steve share a look that Tony can’t dechiper.

“You think he’s a sleeper cell?” Bruce furrows his brow. “You think he fooled _Batman_?”

“No,” Natasha says. “No one fools Batman. Not for that long.”

“And you’ve been talking to him, right?” Bruce asks, looking at Tony. “You and Batman, you’ve been having dad time?”

“Please don’t ever say that to me again,” Tony says, as earnestly as he knows how.

“He could’ve called it daddy time,” Clint offers, like even speaking the words into the universe isn’t some kind of dark invocation.

“Barton,” Tony says, “what the hell is wrong with you?”

Clint grins sunnily up at him and then shrugs. “So what I’m hearing,” he says, with that slow _who me? _drawl that sets off a series of alarm bells, “is that Batman’s still available for d--”

“I will personally drink bleach,” Tony says. “I will. If you finish that statement, I’m leaving this life.”

Clint’s eyes narrow consideringly. “Am I in the will?”

“Is this going to go on for a while?” Bruce asks. “Because I actually left a kind of sensitive experiment in the lab, and I’d really like to--”

“Natasha,” Steve says, “what’s your read?”

Natasha goes still for a second. When she moves, it’s just to swivel around in her chair and watch the recording of the fight from earlier. “He knows us,” she says. She reaches forward, starts rushing the video forward. “He was throwing our own moves back at us.”

“Yeah,” Tony says. “We saw. But it’s not that difficult to believe that an experienced fighter would adopt--”

“No,” she says. She stops at one particular moment and plays the feed. They all watch as Jason sweeps Clint with a move that only half-works, probably he’s so incredibly familiar with it. They’re all incredibly familiar with it. “That’s mine,” she says. “I didn’t use it in this fight.”

Tony blinks. “JARVIS?” he asks. Because there’s a chance she’s wrong. The fight turned flashy toward the middle. Fast-paced and hectic, all three of them showing off.

“Ms. Romanoff is correct, sir,” JARVIS says.

Bruce hesitates. His eyes move from Nat to Tony to Steve. “So this guy is studying us?”

“Looks like,” Steve says.

Tony gets the feeling he’s meant to be alarmed by that, but he hears Jason saying _You ever play keep-away where the stakes are you win or a kid’s brains get splattered on a sidewalk twenty stories down?_ and _If I have to fight you, I’m gonna need a few surprises_, and he finds that he’s comforted, instead.

“He’s had to fight his clients,” Tony says. He tries to keep his tone casual. He’s never very good at that, not with this crowd. As usual, it makes everyone shift to stare at him like he’s just unexpectedly dropped his pants. “More than once. Telepaths put ideas in the parents’ heads, make them think they need to kill their own kid. He wanted to keep some secrets in case he had to fight me.”

There are several long seconds where nobody says anything. And then Clint, really leaning into those Iowa vowels, drawing it out so long that it’s almost its own sentence, says, “Shit.”

“And he has a plan for that?” Steve asks. “For fighting Iron Man? He has a plan he thinks will work?”

Tony shrugs. “Seemed to.”

Natasha studies the gym video, hums thoughtfully under her breath. “I think,” she says, freezing the frame on a moment where Clint’s flat on his back and Natasha’s in midair, thrown half the length of the ring by Jason, “that he probably has a plan for all of us.”

“Jesus,” Bruce says. “This guy isn’t even hired yet?”

“Probationary status through the end of the month,” Tony says.

“Well,” Clint says, through another mouthful of pasta, “I’d lock that shit down, Stark. The guy’s a professional.”

“He’s very good,” Natasha says, although it sounds less like an endorsement and more like an objective assessment. She says it the same way someone might say, _A tiger can leap up to thirty feet, and has a bite force of around 1000 psi._

“I could take him long-distance,” Clint says, with a pensiveness that is almost adorable, given the truly insane shots Tony’s seen him pull off. “But his close combat skills are better than mine. I’d need Nat, or I’d need to shoot him a couple times first.”

“Please don’t shoot Mia’s bodyguard,” Tony says. “And, if you have to, please don’t do it in front of her.”

Clint grimaces in a way that suggests he acknowledges the unpalatable nature of assassinating a six-year-old’s bodyguard in front of her while also resigning himself to the reality of it, should it prove necessary. Tony takes a moment to wonder when he became such an expert at reading Barton’s facial expressions. He takes an even longer moment to marvel at Barton’s table manners.

“To be fair to Barton,” Steve says, which is an arrangement of vowels and consonants he has never previously uttered in Tony’s presence, “we still don’t know where this guy comes from.”

“Fifteen years,” Tony points out. He appreciates the team’s concern. He sure as hell wants their eyes on this. But did his homework before he ever invited Jason into the building for an interview. This is _Mia_. “He’s been in this line of work for fifteen years. Hasn’t lost a single kid. Not to rub anyone’s nose in it, but that’s a better record than any of us.”

“Hey,” Steve says, tone sharp. He very deliberately does not look at anyone on the team. Which is for the best, probably, because they are all very busy not looking at each other. It occurs to Tony that, despite whatever progress Rhodey assures him he’s making, he is still, sometimes, an asshole.

“He saves one kid at a time,” Natasha says. Her tone is gentle, which means she’s saying it for Clint. Or maybe Bruce. “We try to save every kid in a city, or a country, or the world. You really wanna pull numbers, Stark? Ours are still better.”

“I’m not saying they aren’t,” Tony says. “Look, I suit up just like you do. But someone’s got to stay behind, and the ‘no dead kids’ thing is a real selling point from a parent’s perspective.”

“And why doesn’t he suit up?” Clint asks. “He’s worked with Batman, and Xavier, and the Titans. I didn’t know people could even make it out of those orbits without matching uniforms.”

“You know, Barton,” Tony says, “you’ve really gotta learn to embrace different lifestyles. Not everyone’s the same as you, and that’s okay.”

“He has a point,” Steve says. Because of course he does. Steve’s never so much as glimpsed a threat without hurtling himself bodily in front of it. Tony wonders what Steve sees when he looks at Jason, cowardice or selfishness.

But maybe that’s not fair. Maybe that’s not what Steve’s thinking at all. Tony’s never excelled at reading him. And it would probably be a lot easier to hold the moral high ground on this one if Tony hadn’t been pondering a similar question an hour or so ago.

“Well,” Natasha says, “why would he suit up? Why do any of us?”

Steve gives her a look of healthy skepticism. If nothing else, she’s at least taught him to hesitate before walking right into a trap. “People need us,” he says eventually, with the serious, forthright conviction of the Greatest Generation.

The smile Natasha gives him is patient and warm, but it still makes Tony want to guard his weak points. “Mia is a person.”

Steve blinks. “Of course she is. I’m not saying she doesn’t deserve protection. I’m just saying---”

“Whoever saves a single life, Captain,” Natasha says, with a sweetness to her tone that has Clint choking on his pasta. “Maybe he found his life.”

In the silence that follows, Tony remembers something Jason said at his interview. “Oh, hey,” he says, “J, didn’t Todd answer this one? Run audio from the interview. Something about saving the world?”

There’s a bit of silence while JARVIS finds the clip in question. And then, with his voice full off an earnestness he hasn’t shown to the team so far, Jason speaks: “This is what I do. You fuck around, saving the world. And I make sure nobody kills your kid.”

“Fuck,” Steve repeats, audibly indignant, “around.”

“Well,” Clint shrugs. “We do kinda fuck around sometimes, Cap.”

“There you go,” Natasha says. She leans back in her chair, apparently appeased, and Tony isn’t sure what she thinks that proves or what she’s deduced about Jason from it, but he knows enough to trust her ability to pick people apart.

He’s not sure he’s ever seen a better lineup of character witnesses. Batman, Oracle, Xavier, Mia, and now Natasha. At some point, Tony’s really going to have to resign himself to hiring Jason Todd.


	5. Chapter 4

Jason settles into their lives with an ease that is almost disconcerting. He’s at the Tower early every morning, manifesting in the private elevator around 7:25am. It’s a bit hit-or-miss whether he bothers to check in with security or allow himself to be seen by the cameras beforehand, but he’s never late. No matter how close he cuts it, he’s always stepping into the penthouse before the clock ticks over to 7:31.

It’s offensive, is what it is. Jason roams around in what is possibly the world’s most cavalier interpretation of business casual, steals the last of Tony’s coffee without refiling the pot, pillages the fridge like it was stocked just for him, and routinely provides entirely unprompted critiques of Tony’s life choices, but he is never late, never unprepared, never caught-off-guard.

“Oh, no,” Pepper says, “I wonder what it would be like to work with someone whose professionalism is limited solely to the elements of his job he finds personally rewarding.”

“Yikes,” Tony says. “Fine_. _I’ll go over the minutes. Good God. You miss _one _meeting and--”

“You’ve _made_ one meeting,” Pepper reminds him, unhelpfully. She doesn’t even look away from her tablet. Tony remembers a time when his lackadaisical approach to business meetings used to shock her. He guesses they’ve all grown cynical over time. “Out of a possible seven. You’ve made one.”

“Isn’t this why you’re CEO?” Tony asks. “So I don’t have to go to meetings anymore?”

Pepper lowers her tablet. Her eyes focus on him, and her eyebrows arch, and Tony flew a nuke into space, so he knows he’s not a coward. But something about the intensity of her stare prompts a nigh-irrepressible urge to throw himself under his desk.

“Three o’clock,” she tells him. “Next Tuesday.”

“I literally cannot wait,” Tony says. “I am in physical pain due to the level of anticipation I am experiencing. I’ll be there, Pep. I promise.”

Pepper considers him for several seconds and then her face softens, almost imperceptivity. “If you don’t like Jason, you can hire someone else. You know that, don’t you? He’ll _live _here, Tony. If you don’t like him--”

“It’s not that I don’t like him,” Tony says, waving that aside. “He’s fine. He’s kind of an asshole, but all of my favorite people are assholes.”

Pepper seems to weigh whether or not to be offended by that, but, after a moment, she shrugs it off. He’s always admired her pragmatism. “Well, then what’s the issue?”

Tony grimaces. He can’t answer that for her. He can’t even answer it for himself. Jason’s been working for him for a week, and there’s nothing he can point to as a source for the vague unease he feels.

Jason is always on time. Jason does not object to staying late. Jason is competent and capable, and he genuinely seems to like Mia, who genuinely likes him right back. He’s watched two full seasons of _My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic _without a single complaint.

He spent a combined three hours over the past four days teaching Mia to do a handstand.

And, when Mia finally managed it, Jason elbowed his way into Tony’s office, interrupting a meeting with Bruce about the ongoing quinjet developments. And then he stood there, looming, until Bruce started compulsively cleaning his glasses, and Tony finally stopped monologing about the aerospike engines.

“Hey,” he’d said, glowering at Tony, “Mia’s figured out the handstand. I know you’re busy, but she wants you to--”

“No shit?” Tony’d rocketed to his feet, getting a handful of Bruce’s shirt on the way up so he could drag him along too. “Where is she? I gotta see. Bruce, my kid’s gonna be an acrobat.”

It was only afterwards, after Mia had struggled through her nerves to rise, triumphant, on her hands, feet kicking at the sky, after Bruce had clapped politely but enthusiastically, after Tony had carried her around the room and then right into the kitchen for celebratory ice cream, _after _all of it, that Tony realized Jason had marched into the office like someone’s pissed-off probation officer because he thought he’d have to drag Tony out.

“Pep,” Tony says, still not quite sure that this is _the _problem but very sure that it is _a _problem, “I think he expects me to be a shitty dad.”

Not that he’s the first. As soon as the media realized he was a father, they were tearing him apart for being a bad one. And he earned it, maybe, since he wasn’t even in Mia’s life until the situation mandated turning to the last resort, but it rankles anyway.

He isn’t Howard. In a whole host of ways, on any number of fronts, he is not his father.

The smile Pepper gives him is kinder than he maybe deserves. She’s seen him at his worst. But then, she’s seen him at his best, too. Sometimes he thinks the highest endorsement of himself he can offer is that Pepper and Rhodey and Happy know all there is to know about him and still think he’s worthwhile.

“Take a step back, Tony,” Pepper advises. “He doesn’t know you yet. If that’s his assumption going in, it probably has more to do with his past experiences than his assessment of you.”

And even if that’s fair, it’s not much comfort. Things don’t have to be personal for them to feel that way.

“Oh well,” Tony says, thinking about the way Jason looks at him sometimes, like he’s surprised, like he’s reevaluating. “Guess I’ll just win him over with my good looks and boundless interpersonal charm.”

Pepper doesn’t laugh at him. She’s always been a sweetheart when it counts.

\- - -

Jason rolls into work one morning on the back of someone else’s bike. Tony’s loitering in the lobby, swigging coffee and coming down from another one of his nightmares. Steve is upstairs trying to cajole Mia into eating her oatmeal. He’d have better luck if he let her dye it blue, but Steve has some pretty strong objections to food additives for a man who once laid back and let Erskine and Howard pump pure scientific conjecture into his veins.

Tony dodges outside the second he realizes Jason’s arriving with company. Jason’s keycard gets stashed in different buildings every night, but it still hasn’t made it anywhere approximating home. Tony has no idea where Jason goes when he leaves, and, frankly, the curiosity could turn lethal at any moment.

“Thanks,” Jason says, as he slides off the bike. “Shit,” he adds, a second later, when his eyes fall on Tony. He sounds more exasperated than annoyed, which is why Tony feels completely within his rights to approach.

“Hey,” Tony says. There’s more planned for after that, but the look the woman gives him slaps the words right out of his mouth. He hasn’t seen such naked derision since that time he and Steve almost brawled out their respective insecurities on the helicarrier.

She’s dark-haired and blue-eyed and beautiful in the way of women who belong in biker bars and boxing rings. She looks a little like she might be hiding a razorblade in her mouth. If he were younger, Tony would probably already be a little in love with her, but, fortunately for everyone, his survival instincts finally kicked in sometime after his thirtieth birthday.

“Jesus, Jones,” Jason says, as he tucks his helmet under his arm. “Calm down with that face. He’s not gonna steal your wallet.”

The woman – Jones, apparently – turns her gaze on Jason, and Tony is slightly mollified when the irritation on her face doesn’t abate in the slightest. “It’s seven in the fucking morning,” she tells him, sounding personally aggrieved. “Smiling hours aren’t til after five.”

And then she’s gone, roaring up the street and out of sight, and Jason huffs out an incredulous breath, but he’s smiling, a little, when Tony looks his way.

“Smiling hours?” Tony asks.

“Oh, sure,” Jason says, with a nod. “I think they’re scheduled sometime between ‘go to hell’ and ‘go fuck yourself’ o’clock.”

And yeah, that’s absolutely when Tony would’ve penciled those in, as well. “Hell of a lady,” he says. “Is she single?”

Jason smirks. “Don’t get ambitious, Stark. You wouldn’t survive five minutes.”

Tony gives him a dubious look. “I’m a superhero. Did you know that? You may have heard about me. Iron Man? Saved the world?”

Jason snorts. His grin is sidelong and crooked and a little fond, and Tony realizes suddenly that they’re almost friends, the two of them. They have inside jokes, and they know each other’s coffee preferences, and Tony can read whole paragraphs into each of Jason’s smiles.

“She’d crush you,” Jason says, with absolute certainty.

“Yeah,” Tony says, hands in his pockets, staring ruefully up the street toward where that belligerent brunette disappeared. “You’re probably right. But, hey, what if we set her up with Steve?”

Jason laughs, bright and surprised. “Jesus Christ,” he says, delighted, “can we?”

\- - -

_Jones _is _Jessica Jones_, a private detective in Hell’s Kitchen. There isn’t much information about her, but what’s out there indicates she performs her job with all the skill, tenacity, and social grace of your average rabid bulldog. She isn’t formally tied to any heroes, hasn’t gone public with any mutations, and isn’t listed on any government databases as potentially enhanced.

She does have a single Yelp review wherein one ex-client complains that she physically threw him the length of a bar. Tony isn’t sure how much credence to give that, and, when he asks Jason about it, Jason just scowls at him and says, “If you’re gonna creep on all my friends, you’re never gonna meet any of them again.”

“Not entirely sure this counts as meeting,” Tony says, “since you didn’t even introduce us.”

“I told you,” Jason says, “she’d crush you. Like an empty can of Bud Light in a frat boy’s hands.”

“So she _is _enhanced,” Tony says.

Jason doesn’t roll his eyes, but the expression that flicks across his face suggests it’s a mighty effort to hold it back. “I meant emotionally.”

“Oh, sure,” Tony says. “Where I’m most vulnerable.”

They’re in the kitchen, making lunch while Mia industriously constructs a replica of Stark Tower with the LEGO set Clint brought her two days ago. The project is a little too complex and delicate for her still-clumsy hands, but she’s weathering the frustration as well as can be expected. She’s only cried twice, which Tony thinks is pretty impressive, considering he’d almost cried the last time Steve broke the coffeemaker.

Jason, as usual, is doing something unnecessarily flashy with the kitchen knives. Tony’s not sure what the vegetables of the world did to Jason, but he seems to get some kind of grim satisfaction out of taking his revenge upon them. Tony’s never seen a more terrifying assembling of a salad.

Tony’s still side-eying the brutal dissection of a bell pepper when JARVIS interrupts with an unusually clipped, “Urgent call from Steve Rogers, sir.”

Tony shifts, blinks into Iron Man. It works like that sometimes. Lately, he’s been feeling like _Tony Stark _and _Iron Man _are two separate people. Maybe it’s easier to think of it like that, to give himself some kind of barrier between the risks of Iron Man fighting and the consequences of Tony Stark dying.

It’s not that his life was easier before Mia, exactly. But he certainly had less to lose.

Tony breathes in. Iron Man breathes out. “Let’s hear it, J,” he says, side-stepping around the kitchen island and beelining toward the elevator. Behind him, that chef’s knife in Jason’s hands thunks into the cutting board, quick, precise, and measured.

\- - -

It’s a no-shit, all-hands-on-deck, end-of-the-world emergency, and that means everyone. That means all the Avengers. Happy and Pepper are in Chicago, and Rhodey’s working a mission in Asia, and so there’s no one to leave with Mia except Jason Todd.

“That’s his job,” Steve says, over the comm. “That’s why you hired him. It’s going to be alright, Tony.”

It’s the first time he’s left Mia with someone who isn’t an Avenger, or Rhodey, or Happy, or Pepper. He’s leaving Mia with someone, and the only thing tying that person to Mia is the money he pays them. And there’s always someone willing to pay more. There’s always someone willing to use something more motivating than money.

“I’ve got the kid, Stark,” Jason says, when Tony hesitates, fully suited up, already wasting time. He has to save the world. Mia is _in _in the world. He has to go.

“_Tony_,” Jason says. He steps forward, squares up with the Iron Man suit. He has that SIG at his back, and two knives, and more skill than anyone can properly explain. The look in his eyes reminds Tony of Steve Rogers, of Rhodey, of Nat and Clint. A soldier with a mission. “I’ve got the kid. Go to work.”

There aren’t words to explain what Mia means to him. He doesn’t try to find them.

“I’ll be back,” he says. “After it’s over. Tell her I’ll be back.”

The expression on Jason’s face changes. A door sliding shut. “Go to work,” he repeats.

Tony goes.

\- - -

The Avengers touch down in New York twelve hours later. Tony could’ve been home earlier if he’d let JARVIS pilot the suit home, but a rouge telepath had fucked with half the team before Tony took him out, and mandatory team observation after telepathic fuckery is one of Steve’s most vehemently enforced post-battle rules. None of them are going anywhere alone tonight.

The telepath hadn’t been in Tony’s head. He’d skipped Clint, too, focusing on Bruce, and Steve, and Nat.

Setting off Bruce was a rookie move. The Hulk’s mind doesn’t respond well to telepathic manipulation. Once the Hulk was loose, he couldn’t control him.

Trying to flip Steve was another tactical misstep. Clint stole Steve’s shield before it got anywhere near Tony, led Steve on a chase halfway through the compound, kept him busy until the telepath’s hold snapped when Nat found him.

The telepath was untested and inexperienced, couldn’t contain the Hulk, couldn’t keep up with Steve. Natasha got the worst of it, because fighting a panicked telepath is like taking a meat cleaver to the soul. He’d ransacked through Nat, upending her walls, throwing her back into the worst of her memories.

The telepath had been young. Old enough to buy cigarettes, but Tony would card him for beer. And Tony had shot him in the head, because, when he rounded the corner, Natasha’s eyes were wide and empty, and there were tears on her face.

It’s strange, the things that weigh on you. Steve told him once that he still sees the faces of the men he killed back in the 1940’s. And Tony can’t say he regrets what he’s done, but he thinks it’s fair and normal to wish he’d never had to do it.

Anyway, Natasha’s worse off than he is. Worse than any of them.

Steve’s back in his head before the end of the fight, and Bruce shakes back into his skin shortly after, but Natasha’s borderline unresponsive, too deep in her own mind to find her way out. Clint won’t leave her side, so Tony pilots the quinjet home with Bruce in the co-pilot seat, obsessively scanning the news footage for updates about civilian casualties.

Steve, of course, is silent and stoic. Tired, but unshaken. Tony knows him well enough by now to know that, whatever the telepath did to him, he probably does worse to himself.

When the quinjet touches down, they drag themselves through debrief, and a SHIELD telepath brushes through their minds, checking for traps. Natasha’s still while the telepath works, barely seems to breathe, but she’s more focused afterwards, re-anchored.

It’s almost two in the morning when they’re cleared to leave.

They’re standing in a now-empty SHIELD conference room, trying to summon the mental wherewithal to figure out who’s babysitting who. Tony expects to get Bruce, who’s more or less his live-in physicist at this point, but he’s surprised when the murder twins assign themselves to the Tower, as well.

Natasha explains in Russian and then blinks, reorients, remembers herself. She opens her mouth like she’s going to try again and then goes blank. Her eyes slide closed.

It’s normal, Tony knows. The brain is amazingly resilient but easily overloaded. Natasha will be better in the morning.

“Mia,” Clint says, into the silence that follows. “Nat needs to check on her.”

Tony wonders what the hell that telepath put in Natasha’s head. He is, for one ugly brutal second, not at all sorry that he splattered that asshole’s brains over the dingy bricks of a back alley.

Steve takes a breath. For a second, he looks completely resigned to breaking his own post-telepathic fuckery rule and going back to his sad Brooklyn apartment all by himself.

“Team sleepover, Cap,” Tony says, before Steve can even begin to pitch the idea. “It’ll be fun.”

Steve hesitates. His eyes move around the table, assessing his team. They resettle on Tony, and then, slowly, he nods. “Alright,” he says.

\- - -

When the team troops into the penthouse, Jason’s sprawled across the couch in the living room, wide awake, watching a recording of the latest Gotham Blades game. He looks completely relaxed, eyes roving lazily over the five of them, gaze lingering the longest on Natasha before settling on Tony.

“You guys hungry?” he asks. “There’s pizza in the fridge.”

“Oh, thank God,” Bruce says. He’s always hungry after a Hulk interlude, and they have a bad habit of forgetting to feed him. He’s gone immediately, disappearing into the kitchen with a single-minded focus.

“How’s Mia?” Tony asks. He doesn’t mean it to sound like an accusation, but Jason doesn’t seem bothered by his tone.

“Oh, you know,” he says. “We hit the casinos earlier, got thrown out of a couple bars. Released all the bears in the zoo. Graffitied the nearest precinct. Got a couple face tattoos.”

Tony rolls his eyes. He bites back a smile. He’s not sure why the levity helps so much, but Jason’s serene nonchalance feels like ice on a burn that’s still aching. “Sure,” he says, “but no uppers after six o’clock, right?”

Jason scoffs at him. “Of course not. I’m a professional.”

He stands up a second later, stretches his arms over his head. Tony’s not sure he’s seen body language like this before. He wonders if this is just what Jason looks like after midnight, or if he’s doing this on purpose, sauntering around like he’s fresh from some meditative yoga, all loose-limbed and composed.

Any normal civilian would be unsettled by Clint’s bruises, or Steve’s knuckles, or Nat’s dead stare. But whatever Jason is, he isn’t a civilian.

“C’mon,” he says. “She’s been out since nine. If you assholes wake her up, you’re on story-reading duty.”

They cluster around her bedroom door, staring in at her. Tony wants to wake her up, wants to check on her, but the cuts on his face are still fresh. They’ll look better in the morning. He doesn’t want to upset her.

Jason stands in the doorway, fingers curled around the doorframe. There’s nothing threatening about his expression or his posture, but he’s blocking them, a living obstacle between the team and Mia.

Natasha stares in for a long time. When she finally looks away, there’s something settled in her eyes. She steps back toward the living room, and the rest go with her.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” she says, in quiet and unusually precise English. She leaves, and Clint follows after. JARVIS will direct them to one of the guest suites.

“You can come in late,” Tony tells Jason. Steve’s ducked into the kitchen with Bruce, and, between the two of them, they’ll decimate whatever pizza Jason ordered. “Tomorrow, I mean. Just come in whenever you can.”

The look Jason gives him is deliberately patient. “I’ll be here at seven.”

“It’s almost three in the morning,” Tony says. “You need to sleep.”

“I’m going to sleep,” Jason says. He jerks his thumb over his shoulder, back toward the couch. The Blades game is still playing, but Tony knows for a fact that it’s one Jason’s already seen. “I’m sleeping on that couch.”

There’s no reason for Jason to sleep on the couch. There are five Avengers in this tower.

“You don’t need to,” Tony says.

Jason shrugs. “Do I tell you how to kill bad guys?”

Tony doesn’t see how that’s a fair question. “I’m sure you would at the slightest provocation.”

Jason grins, a lightning bolt of a smile, there and gone before Tony can process it. “I’m staying,” he says. “You wanna fight about it, or do you want to get some sleep?”

Tony chooses sleep. It’s a restless, twitchy sleep with nightmares about Natasha and Bruce and Steve, about flying that stupid nuke into space, about being somewhere cold and empty, screaming for friends who can’t hear him.

When he wakes up, it’s almost eight. Jason’s in the kitchen, making French Toast and arguing with Mia about the best Fire-type Pokemon.

“I mean,” Jason says, “Mia, be practical. If your pony is actively _on fire_, you can’t even ride it. What’s the point of a horse that’s on fire?”

“It’s pretty,” Mia tells him, steadfast and certain, and then her whole face lights up when she sees Tony. “_Dad_!” she says, leaping off the kitchen counter and straight into Tony’s arms. “Tell Jason he’s wrong.”

“Jason,” Tony says, as sternly as he can manage, “you’re wrong.” And then, a second later, when Jason surreptitiously flips him off while Mia buries her face in Tony’s shirt, he recalls the decision he made last night, when he woke up for the fifth time and remembered that Jason was twenty yards away, sprawled out on the couch where he could watch Mia’s door.

“You’re wrong,” he repeats, “and you’re hired.”


	6. Chapter 5

Jason moves into the Tower following a prolonged series of negotiations that grows and grows until it drags in two people from Finance, three from Legal, what has to be half of the on-site HR staff, JARVIS, Happy Hogan, and, eventually, Pepper Pots.

“Honestly, Tony,” Pepper says, “we’ve could’ve bought an entire major league sports franchise with less trouble.”

“Oh, could you buy the Blades?” Jason sidles past them, carrying two boxes stacked on top of each other. He’s been moving in all morning; he won’t let anybody touch his things. Jessica Jones is parked in a fire zone, smoking, swigging coffee, and snarling at anyone who gets too close to the rented moving van.

“Buy the Blades,” Jason says, “and move them to New York. I’m sick of losing players to weird Gotham bullshit.”

“I am not buying a hockey franchise,” Tony says. “Because, quite frankly, I don’t understand the rules. And, if I did, I wouldn’t buy a team that hasn’t won the Stanley Cup since the 1970’s.”

The look Jason throws over his shoulder is quite possibly the deadliest thing Tony’s seen out of him so far. “You only learned that fact to hurt me,” he accuses.

“The whole world knows that fact,” Tony counters. Deflection, he’s learned, is a perfectly acceptable tactic. “_Mia _knows the Blades are terrible.”

“They aren’t terrible!” Mia says, scrambling off the couch with a horrified look. The tablet she’s been playing with goes flying, only narrowly avoiding taking a tumble all the way to the floor. “Dad, take it _back_!”

“Get ‘em, Mia,” Jason says. He shoulders his way through his door, still calling back to her. “Bite his knees.”

“I don’t appreciate your encouragement of violence,” Tony says, pitching his voice so that it’s likely to carry into Jason’s suite. Mia tackles him around the knees, and Tony huffs out a breath, pretends to stagger backwards. “You’re a horrible example for Mia.”

There’s a beat of silence and then Jason pokes his head back through the door. He does not appear especially apologetic. “At least I’m teaching her to have decent taste,” he says. “Mia, you gotta hook the ankle and pull back. Hip check him.”

Mia scrambles beside Tony, and there’s some sudden confluence of movements that genuinely rocks Tony on his feet, almost makes him lose his balance.

“Woah,” Tony says, taking a double-step back, getting himself centered again. “Mia, what was that?”

Mia shrugs and then plops her hands on her hips, glaring up at him with a disappointed frown that Tony knows – absolutely and without question – she learned from Steve Rogers. “The Blades are a great team, Dad,” she says.

Tony glances toward the door, but Jason’s safely out of hearing distance, probably unpacking the latest round of boxes. “Sure, kiddo,” he says. He reaches down, hooks her hair behind her ears. The sharp look on her face softens. He’s fascinated, almost always, by how quickly she forgives. “But don’t tell Jason I said that.”

She’s a straightforward kid, generally, and doesn’t always share his love of mischief. But she’s been learning about the value of pranks from Clint and sometimes from Rhodey, and she nods slowly, teeth catching at her lip, already having to struggle to hold back laughter. “Okay,” she says. “I won’t.”

\- - -

Tony’s handpicked employees before. He’s headhunted. He’s gone after the best, lured them away from places that provided steady paychecks but didn’t inspire or appreciate them, brought people into SI who came with a laundry list of very specific demands.

He’s never hired anyone as difficult or as particular as Jason.

Jason pointblank refuses to live onsite unless all monitoring systems are removed from his suite. He demands scheduled JARVIS blackouts in the gym. He makes Tony sign a contract saying that he will not take Mia into Gotham for the length of Jason’s employment without providing at least a month’s notice.

He spends three full hours arguing with the hiring team over his salary and then, once he has it, he hounds Finance about the particulars of how and when he expects the money to be deposited. The whole thing becomes so convoluted that Tony eventually has JARVIS track the money, just make sure he’s not somehow single-handedly funding an organized crime syndicate in some small European nation.

But the money, JARVIS reports, is primarily being routed to a series of Gotham-based charities. And there’s nothing technically illegal about the way that money is being sent, although Tony hasn’t seen a paper trail that complicated since the last time he busted a rival on money laundering after a particularly hurtful comment at a trade show. He wonders at the secrecy, but he mostly wonders at the skill.

And he wonders, a bit, at the kind of person who’d spend hours ruthlessly campaigning for more money just so he could give away almost three-quarters of it.

He wonders if Jason lives cheap because he doesn’t care about money or because he already has more than he needs. He wonders about the state of Jason’s finances in general, but JARVIS can’t get those records.

When Tony tries, Oracle sends along another message: _Don’t dig here, Stark. Jason likes his privacy. _

And then, a few seconds later: _You made the right choice. He’ll keep your kid safe. _

Tony wonders quite a bit about Jason, across that stretch of days when Jason slowly moves into the Tower and becomes a permanent fixture in their daily lives. But the thing that sticks with him, the image that keeps kicking around in his head, is the paper he’d signed titled “Appointment of Agent to Control Disposition of Remains,” the form that put him in charge of cremating Jason’s body if he happens to die while under Tony’s employ.

“Well, it’s kind of a tradition at this point,” Jason told him, when they were signing the form in front of two separate witnesses. It was impossible to tell whether he meant being cremated or dying on the job.

“Jesus,” Tony said, because it felt like the sort of thing people said at moments like this. If there were moments like this that happened to people that weren’t him.

“Anyway,” Jason continued, “you probably don’t need to worry. But if I kick it, burn me immediately. Okay? Viking funeral, flaming pyre. Medical waste incinerator. These are all valid options. Xavier was gonna have one of his fire-breathers do it, but I know your team’s tragically low on magic users. I guess you can have Thor call down the fury of the heavens.”

He’d shrugged then, casually, dismissively. Like he couldn’t possibly care less about what happened to his body after he died. Except that couldn’t be true, because he was so adamant about how quickly and thoroughly he wanted it reduced to ashes.

“Whatever,” Jason said. “I don’t care how you do it. Just burn it. And if anybody shows up claiming to be my family, do not under _any _circumstances let them put my corpse in the dirt.”

“This is the most disturbing conversation I’ve ever had,” Tony told him, as earnestly as he knew how. “I want you to know that.”

Jason just grinned at him, wide and unworried, and then reached over to pat Tony encouragingly on the shoulder. “Yeah,” he’d said, “I forget sometimes that you’re kinda new at this.”

“At hiring people?” Tony asked, because he’d been hiring employees for decades now, and this hadn’t come up once.

“No,” Jason said, with a strange twist of his mouth. “Being a superhero.”

\- - -

That comment about being new rankles Tony at first, but it is, obnoxiously, not inaccurate. The Battle of New York just had its third anniversary, and Tony’s only been Iron Man for six years. By the time he climbed into the first suit, Jason had already been working with heroes for eleven years.

Maybe that’s why he fits so easily into Tony’s life.

He’s not cowed by the Avengers, and not especially curious about them, either. He doesn’t have much to say to any of them about their work, and he seems hell-bent on keeping Mia as removed from it as possible. They don’t talk about their missions in front of her, not directly, but Jason will herd Mia out of the room even when they’re speaking so obliquely that she can’t possibly understand what it is they really mean.

There’s a strange tension that hits Jason, sometimes, a silence that feels more edged than usual. It takes weeks for Tony to understand that it’s Jason physically holding himself back from meddling, doing his best not to backseat hero his way into Avengers business. And Tony only figures it out because Jason finally breaks his own rules, throws a handful of silverware into the dishwasher with unnecessary vehemence, and then bites out, “They should be here,” without context or further comment.

Tony looks up from the kitchen island. The team’s just trooped off to their respective homes after a late-night ransacking of Tony’s fridge, and Tony has been doing his best to marshal the very last of his energy so he can drag himself to bed.

“They should be here,” Tony repeats. His brain hums with it, booting back up out of hibernation. “Who should—what?”

“Your team,” Jason tells him. He’s agitated. His mannerisms are spikier than normal. Tony focuses, forces himself to a higher level of awareness. “Your team’s all—and you sent them away.”

“I didn’t send anyone—what the hell.” Tony frowns at him. “They don’t _live _here, Jason. It’s late. God knows how Bats or Xavier do it, but we don’t treat missions as the pregame to a long night of clubbing. We don’t have teenagers on the team. We are all real grownups. And I don’t know if you’re aware, but this is work is kind of exhausting.”

Jason straightens up like Tony just spat in his face. “I know what the fucking work is, Stark.”

Tony hesitates. He feels off-balance suddenly. He thought they were having one argument, but now it feels like they’re having another, uglier one. “Look,” he says. He keeps his tone mild; he doesn’t have the energy to get into a yelling match with Jason right now, and, anyway, it would wake Mia up. “I’m not trying to be an asshole. I’m just saying it’s late. We’re tired. They went home to sleep it off.”

Jason stares at him for a long, weighted moment and then he suddenly breaks eye-contact and nudges the dishwasher shut with his knee. “You have rooms for them here,” he says. He’s still not looking at Tony. He’s fussing with the dishwasher, jabbing at the buttons like JARVIS won’t automatically run it overnight. “They should be here. Your team should in the Tower.”

Tony blinks at him. He honestly, legitimately cannot understand what the hell Jason is saying to him. He doesn’t understand why Jason will bite his lip and walk away when the Avengers are discussing tactics but feels the need to break his silence about living arrangements. But he can tell, somehow, that it’s important.

And it feels like a bad idea to be dismissive. Like, somehow, if he shuts Jason down now, he’ll never get anything else out of him.

_Seventeen years_, Tony thinks. Maybe experience has its value.

“You think so?” he asks.

Jason’s still for a second. When he looks over, he’s scowling, eyebrows pulled together, chin tipped up. Defensive, Tony guesses. And he’s sure about that a few seconds later, when he watches all those sharp angles relax as Jason seems to realize he’s not being mocked.

“You worry all the time about vulnerability in the field,” Jason says. His hands are twisting at his sides. Tony watches as Jason grabs a kitchen towel, starts wiping at the perfectly clean counters. “All your upgrades, your drills. You’re so focused on the field. But the easiest way to take this team apart is one-by-one, post-mission.”

Tony’s stomach tenses up like someone just sucker-punched him. He stares hard at Jason, at the flex of muscles of his forearm as he leans into the self-assigned task. He’s strong, and he’s smart, and he climbs elevator shafts, and he’s not aging like he should. And apparently he spends his spare time strategizing ways to kill Tony’s team.

“Think about it,” Jason says. He sounds like he’s _asking_. “Someone kills Barton overnight, and how long does it take anyone to notice?”

“What the hell,” Tony says, because those are the only words in his head. “You think about this stuff? You make these kind of plans for fun?”

Jason scowls. He drops the towel, throws it against the counter. “I know how people get killed in this business,” he says. “And I’m telling you how it’s going to happen to your team. One-by-one, post-mission. You wanna keep them safe? Keep them _close_. Banner’s here, but that’s not enough. You need to stay together until you’re steady again. This is basic shit. You should know this already.”

A few years ago, Tony would’ve gone after Jason for that last comment like a fish after a baited hook. He’d gone after Steve Rogers for less. But he’s matured into this life, knows enough now to appreciate the efficiency of keeping the peace instead of having to negotiate a ceasefire.

“Okay,” he says. “And how do you know that? You have a little vigilante side-hustle? Wear a mask on your nights off?”

Jason grimaces. He looks more disgusted than insulted, but the revulsion runs deep enough – and obvious enough – that Tony immediately doubts his own half-formed theory. “This is my job,” Jason says. “This is what I do. I keep Mia safe. It’s gonna be a lot harder to do that if your team starts dying off until everyone’s gunning for you.”

Tony very carefully takes all the images that sentence provokes and packs them up, folds them over and over, and stores them away in the back of his mind, where he keeps Howard, and the Ten Rings, and all the civilians he wasn’t fast enough to save.

“You worried about your paycheck?” he asks. Although he knows that can’t be it. Jason doesn’t even keep most of his paycheck.

Jason huffs out a breath. He rolls his eyes. But he doesn’t make eye-contact again. “Yeah, asshole,” he grumbles, as he finally moves the to leave the kitchen. “I’m worried about my fucking paycheck.”

\- - -

The next time they all assemble, Tony invites the team to stay at the Tower for the night. There’s no reason for it. There hasn’t been any telepathic fuckery. No one’s been shot. No one got interrogated or blown up or pinned under debris. The mission ran long, as these missions tend to do when there’s more than one target to track down, but no one’s hurt beyond a few new stitches in Barton and a singed section on Romanoff’s arm and Bruce’s tragic loss of his latest favorite sweater.

“Uh,” Barton says, when he asks. His eyes dart to Natasha and then settle back on Tony. “Like,” he says, slowly, feeling his way through the word, “stay? Spend the—what do you mean, stay?”

“It’s been pointed out to me,” Tony says, maybe a bit stiffly, “that we’re scattering when we’re at our most vulnerable. And so, maybe, in the interests of safety, we should--”

“You’re worried we’re going to get taken out when we’re split up,” Natasha says. Her eyes narrow in on him like she’s seeing crosshairs on his forehead. He doesn’t let that bother him. She always gets like this after a mission.

“Well,” Tony says. “Jesus. ‘Taken out,’ I don’t—I just think, maybe, either the three of you stay at SHIELD overnight and Bruce and I stay at the Tower, or all five of us go to the Tower.”

Steve raises his eyebrows. “And whoever pointed this out to you, did they mean it as a warning or a threat?”

“A warning, I think,” Tony says. He’s pretty sure. At least seventy-five perfect sure. “Anyway, never mind. It’s not important. Don’t get weird.”

“No,” Natasha says. “It’s a good idea. We should do it.”

He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction of catching him so obviously by surprise, but the smirk she tips his way suggests he’s failed anyway.

“Yeah,” Clint says, with a shrug. “Sure. Sounds great. Good for team cohesion or whatever. You’re gonna feed us, right, Stark? I’ve got very specific dietary needs.”

“Specifically,” Natasha says, “he needs to eat half his body weight in carbs evert morning.”

“Does Mia have any Lucky Charms left?” Clint looks earnest and hopeful, and not at all like a grown man trying to steal a child’s cereal.

“No,” Bruce says, which really just reveals how deep the treachery runs. “But there’s some s’mores Pop-Tarts in the back of the cabinet.”

“Hell yes,” Clint says. “I’m in. Let’s go immediately.”

\- - -

Jason doesn’t react when the team wanders in, aside from gesturing toward the fridge, which is full of takeout from the Indian restaurant he seems to like. He’s friendly, as usual, and seems happy to trade alarmingly casual shoptalk about the fresh line of stitches bisecting one of Clint’s eyebrows. Tony passes the food out to the team, and he thinks he should be surprised to realize that all of the takeout boxes have names printed on them in Jason’s clear, bold print.

But he isn’t surprised. He’s used to Jason paying attention, tracking all the tiny details Tony relies on JARVIS for. He’s starting to understand the way Jason works, how he takes care of things quietly, doing everything sideways. Like someone taught him affection is a chess match, and you’ll lose, every time, if you’re too direct.

The team probably thinks JARVIS ordered the food. And if they recognize Jason’s handwriting, they no doubt assume it was all done under JARVIS’ direction. The only one who maybe pieces together the truth is Natasha, who treats Jason to a sharp, knowing smile that makes him roll his eyes and duck his head so he can shovel more tandoori chicken in his mouth.

They eat their way through the food, methodical and zombie-eyed, and then slowly disperse. Tony watches Jason so he can catch the exact moment when he works out the team’s staying at the Tower tonight. There’s a brief flicker of confusion in his eyes followed by a quick glance at Tony and then his face adopts that studied blankness he trots out whenever he wants to lie to Tony about how many pastries he stole from the most recent gift basket or whether or not he’s been intentionally overloading Mia’s vocabulary with pirate-themed terminology.

Jason’s quiet for a while after the team meanders down to the floors Tony designed for them during the Tower rebuild. He picks up, making a series of judgmental faces about the wreck a pack of hungry Avengers leaves in its wake, while Tony’s taps out instructions, fills the queue with suit-related repairs for JARVIS to work on overnight.

It’s strange. It’s a strange feeling, having the whole team here. Tony doesn’t really have words for it, because he’s not sure he’s ever felt it before.

Maybe it’s the way he used to feel back at MIT, when Rhodey came back from holiday breaks. Like their little shared apartment was full again. Like the place held life in its walls.

“You were right,” Tony says, finally, when it seems like Jason’s about to head to bed. “They should be here, after missions.”

He’s not sure what he expects. The smugness of victory, maybe. That wry, sidelong way Jason looks at him when he knows he’s right and is amused that Tony’s finally realizing it.

But Jason looks subdued. Diminished, almost. He paints on a smirk, but the look in his eyes reminds Tony of late night TV, years ago, when the channel would go dead and flip to static.

“They’re good people,” Jason says. “Don’t lose track of them.”


	7. Chapter 6

Jason insists – over and over again, at varying volumes and with a truly comprehensive catalog of obscenities – that he is not a metahuman. Not a mutant, not magic, not enhanced in any way. His non-meta status is one of his least favorite discussion topics, and the list of things Jason doesn’t want to talk about is extensive enough that Tony once asked JARVIS to index it.

Tony would be more inclined to buy the veracity of Jason’s claims if he ever once got a full night’s sleep.

“I mean it,” Tony says. He mumbles it into the palm of his hand. He’s having some difficulty keeping his eyes open. “You never sleep. I got JARVIS to run the numbers. You’re suffering from chronic sleep deprivation. JARVIS says you’re gonna develop heart disease and dementia.”

Jason’s standing in the kitchen, one hip propped against the island. He’s wearing running shorts and a truly frat-chic Gotham Knights’ tank top that shows off at least half of his chest. He’s flushed and shining from his early-morning five-mile run. He is offensively, deliberately, and disrespectfully healthy. He looks like he just leapt off the cover of _Men’s Health_. He looks like he should be knocking back a kale smoothie and cheerleading Tony through another round of burpees.

Jason looks like some celebrity’s personal trainer. And Tony, for his part, looks and feels like roadkill.

“Oh, I’m not worried about it,” Jason says, with a toothy grin he must be trotting out on purpose. He normally has the decency not to smile before 9:00am. “Given the life expectancy of this job, I won’t be around long enough for dementia.”

“You should be so fucking lucky,” Tony mutters. He acknowledges he’s being a bit of a grouch. But the Avengers got all-assembled yesterday, and they didn’t make it back to the Tower until just after four in the morning. And then Tony stayed up patching a problem with Nat’s Bites.

He got exactly forty-three minutes of sleep. He’s exhausted. And Jason is an asshole.

Jason laughs and grabs the coffeepot. He tops off Tony’s cup before pouring the last of it into his own. “You should go back to bed,” he says. “I’m up, Stark. I’m here. I’ve got the watch.”

Tony huffs and rubs his eyes. According to JARVIS, Jason was running checks on the suite all the night. Sleeping on the couch for forty-five minute intervals and then doing fifteen-minute perimeter checks. So it makes no fucking sense that Jason’s perky as a college kid at his first tailgate, and here’s Tony, feeling like if he blinks the wrong way his eyes are going to spit blood.

It makes no fucking sense unless Jason’s got some kind of low-grade mutation. Enhanced vitality, minor regenerative abilities. Maybe a watered-down knockoff of the super-soldier serum, or just enough magic to charm a full night’s sleep into four hours of rest.

But Jason says he’s nothing, just a regular human. And Tony, who really _is _a regular human, can sketch out the data and argue his conclusions all he wants, but the only thing it really seems to accomplish is pissing Jason off. And, when he pisses Jason off, his whole life gets more complicated. No more small gestures of domestic thoughtfulness, no more pre-brewed coffee or hot breakfasts or post-mission takeout. Just shitty looks and stony silences and some truly heinous passive aggressive post-it notes affixed to the fridge.

So. Better to keep his mouth shut about his hypotheses, then. Nothing productive to be gained that direction.

“Can’t go back to bed,” Tony says. “Promised Mia I’d take her to see the new dinosaur.”

Jason hums. “At the American Museum of Natural History?”

“Yeah.” Tony knocks back his coffee. Maybe, if he drinks it fast enough, it’ll save him. He remembers a time, pre-Mia, when he tried that theory with whiskey. If this is maturity, it should be kinder to his stomach. “Meeting with one of the curators.”

Jason rolls his eyes, but it’s one of the eye-rolls that comes with a bitten-back smile, so Tony’s learned to translate that as approval. For a man who demanded one hell of a salary, Jason has a reflexive prissiness about Tony’s wealth that is both obnoxious and fascinating.

Well, there’s a lot about Jason that’s both obnoxious and fascinating.

For example, his outfit.

“Get some rest, Stark,” Jason says. “I’ll take her.”

“I’m supposed to bring one of the researchers back,” Tony argues. “Ph.D. candidate. Comparative biology. She’s got--- she’s doing stuff on honeycomb bone structure and locomotion. Bruce wants to talk to her.”

Jason huffs into his coffee. “Oh no,” he says. “Too bad none of your cars fit three people. Too bad I can’t drive. Or speak to strangers.”

Tony blinks at him. “I told Mia I would,” he says, finally.

“Yeah,” Jason says, “and it’s good, you know, that you’re willing to drag your rapidly decaying carcass to a museum for her sake. That’s real sweet, Stark. Good for you. But do you think, given your longstanding history of working too Goddamn much, that maybe you might want to introduce the concept of respecting the physical limits of your body?”

Tony’s mouth drops open. “Fuck you, decaying carcass,” he says, damn near knocking his coffee over in his indignation. “I’m _Ironman_, you disrespectful piece of shit.”

“I just think,” Jason says, “that it’s important to show Mia how much this job costs.”

Tony blinks. Sometimes, he can’t, for the life of him, track the trajectory of what comes out of Jason’s mouth.

“And,” Jason continues, “you shouldn’t put this idea in her head that it’s okay to cause actual physical harm to yourself to avoid disappointing people who love you. Fuck’s sake, Stark. What a lesson.”

“That’s not what I’m--- could you tone it down? Please? This is _breakfast_. You haven’t even read me my Miranda rights.”

Jason raises one of his more dangerous eyebrows. It’s the one that says, _You’re doing something stupid enough that I’m actually going to bestir myself to comment on it. And may God have mercy on your soul. _

“Promises to her are important. I get it. And your commitment is admirable. Really. But you want to think about the message you’re sending when you show up for what’s supposed to be a fun trip looking like something the Crypt Keeper wouldn’t touch.”

Tony scowls. “We can’t all look like background dancers in a music video every morning, Jason.”

Jason scoffs at him, like he’s never once looked in a mirror. “Don’t come at me with flattery to get out of this. You’ve gotta stop glorifying self-sacrifice, or she’s gonna think it’s a virtue.”

Tony sputters into his coffee. “I’m not glorifying--- what the fuck is wrong with you?”

Jason does that dangerous thing with his eyebrow again. “Whole Goddamn family of superheroes, and you think this kid isn’t gonna grow up with some issues about boundaries? Man the fuck up, Stark. Go in there, disappoint your kid, and model some fucking self-care, or that kid’s gonna grow up thinking hurting yourself is how you show people you love them.”

“You know,” Tony says, “these little glimpses into your psyche are deeply alarming.”

Jason puts his coffee down and points sharply toward Mia’s bedroom.

“I _promised_,” Tony says. “Look. It’ll be fine. She won’t even notice. My dad broke promises to me all the time, and it was shitty. I know it’s shitty. I’m not doing it to her.”

Jason points, again. Somehow even more empathically than the first time. It shows off the sloping, muscular lines of his biceps, and Tony’s really starting to hate that tank top. “You’re not raising yourself, Stark. Mia’s got her own separate issues. Take the morning, take a nap, and spend time with her this afternoon. When you’re awake enough to be present for it.”

“Are you always this bossy?” Tony asks. “I mean, were you this bossy with Xavier? Did you yell at Batman?”

Jason laughs. It’s not a nice laugh. Tony would prefer not to hear it again. “Yeah,” he says, not quite looking at Tony, “I had a lot of shit to say to Batman.”

“My God,” Tony says. He tries to imagine it. Stoic, steely-eyed Batman, getting shrieked at over breakfast. “Are there any recordings?”

Jason rolls his eyes and then points, again, to Mia’s bedroom. “You know what?” he says. “If you don’t get your shit together, maybe I’ll do a dramatic reenactment.”

\- - -

Mia pouts when Tony tells her she’ll be seeing the dinosaur without him, but it’s not as bad as he’d feared. The worst part is the way she grabs his hand, reaches out to touch his forehead like she’s feeling for a fever. She worries. She always does, whenever he’s sick or tired or hurt. Which is why it would’ve been better to hide it. Which is what he tries to explain to Jason, with an especially savage scowl over Mia’s shoulder.

But Jason volleys back with a supremely unbothered quirk of his mouth, and then he reaches over, takes Mia, and swings her easily through the air before resettling her on her feet close to the door. “C’mon, kiddo. He’s gotta take a nap, or he’ll get grumpy.”

“I’m not gonna—will you cut it out?” Tony glares at him. “I’m not going to get _grumpy_.”

“Oh no,” Jason says, fake-gasping. He pulls his face into an awful grimace, open-mouthed and horrified. “It’s happening already. Run, Mia. Save yourself!”

Mia giggles and scampers off, and Tony refuses to be charmed. “You’re such an asshole,” he says, once he’s sure Mia’s out of hearing distance.

“Oh, yeah,” Jason says, tone caught somewhere between amused and incredulous. “That’s me.”

“You _are_,” Tony says. “Get out of my tower.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jason says, taking his time meandering toward the door.

“Come back with a Ph.D. candidate and at least three dinosaur-related items from the gift shop,” Tony says. “Or don’t come back at all.”

Jason salutes him, in a gesture so sharp and efficient that even Steve Rogers would be proud. Even if the dual middle fingers that follow probably break a few regulations.

\- - -

JARVIS wakes Tony up when Jason, Mia, and Itza, the Ph.D. candidate, leave the museum. Tony sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed. He’s yawning and running his fingers through his hair, fumbling toward alertness, when JARVIS trips the emergency alarm, and all of the lights in the room flash red.

“Mr. Stark,” JARVIS says, “the car’s emergency system has registered a crash.”

“What the fuck,” Tony says, lurching to his feet. “JARVIS, what the hell is---”

“There is an obstruction in the road,” JARVIS reports.

“Video,” Tony says. “J, give me video.”

JARVIS projects feeds from the car’s exterior and interior cameras. Tony’s eyes dart back and forth, trying to puzzle out the scene.

There are two obstructions in the road, and they are both other vehicles. One of them is pulled parallel across the parking garage’s exit ramp, blocking the way out, and the other has just rammed into the back of the Audi. They’re armored SUVs, both of them.

Inside the car, Mia is already crying.

“No injuries,” Jason says. And then, a second later, “Aw, shit.”

There’s a series of loud, distorted sounds and then JARVIS says, “Gunfire registered. Bulletproof glass holding.”

Tony slams through his bedroom door, shouldering it open. He heads for the balcony. “JARVIS,” he says, “prep the suit. Let’s go. Right now.”

They’re not far away. He can make it. He has to make it.

The video feed is following him as he runs. He glances over. Jason is curling a hand around the back of Itza’s neck, folding her forward. “On the floorboard,” he says. His voice is quiet and slow. It’s the calmest tone Tony’s ever heard him use. “Against the door. The door panel’s gonna have the thickest armor. It’s okay. You’re fine. Don’t freeze up.”

The windshield takes multiple rounds, a spider-web of fracturing glass that lines up with Jason’s head.

“Mia,” Jason’s saying, as JARVIS bolts the suit together, as Tony stands there, helpless, and listens while someone tries to murder his only child. “Mia, kiddo, you know what to do. It’s just loud noises. You gotta be louder, okay? Let’s hear it.”

“Jason,” she says, high and shrill. _Scared_. And then, half a second later, “Dad! JARVIS! _Dad_.”

“Mia,” Tony says, knowing JARVIS will patch him through. “It’s okay. Do what Jason says. I’m almost there.”

“See? He’s on his way. Ironman, Mia. Just for you.” Jason’s craned around in his chair, guiding Mia out of her booster seat.

“Jason,” Mia says. Tony watches as she makes desperate grabbing hands toward Jason, reaching for him.

“Nope,” Jason says, as he resettles her onto the floor. “C’mon, Mia. You know this. Deep breaths, remember?”

Mia takes in one desperate gulping breath and then screams when another bullet hits the glass, inches from Jason’s head.

Jason turns to look out the window. The cameras aren’t angled to catch his expression. When he turns back, there’s an uncanny valley look in his eyes, a hollowness.

“Scary, huh? Bunch of bullies,” he says, voice almost singsong. “Don’t worry. I’ll go talk to them.”

“Don’t leave,” Mia says. There’s so much fear in her voice that Tony wants to throw himself off the side of the Tower, still only half in his suit. He’ll kill these people with his hands if he has to. He’ll kill them, for making her sound like that. “Jason! Don’t leave.”

“Not leaving you, scout,” Jason says. “Just gonna go have a grownup talk with these guys. So, c’mon, like we practiced. Roly poly karaoke. Let’s hear it.”

“I don’t want to,” Mia says. “I’m scared.” There’s a sudden loud _crack_ and then she screams again.

“Sir,” JARVIS says, “they’re breaking through the glass.”

There’s a man with a mask bashing a crowbar into the windshield. Tony takes off, rockets up Park Avenue.

“Forty seconds out,” Tony says. “On my way.”

“Roly poly karaoke,” Jason says. His voice is loud, and serious. There’s another crash in the background. “_Now_, Mia. Do it.”

JARVIS splits the screen between the feed of street in front of him and the footage from inside the car. Tony watches while Mia folds herself into a ball, claps her hands over her ears, and, unbelievably, starts sing-shouting the opening guitar riff of _Enter Sandman_.

“Good job, kiddo,” Jason says. And then, looking at Itza, he says, “Stay down. Stay quiet. If they get in the car, double-tap to center mass.” He leaves a gun on the passenger seat in front of her and then, without warning, he shoves the driver’s side door open and exits the vehicle.

“What the _fuck_,” Tony says, as the driver’s door slams and locks. “JARVIS, what the fuck is he--”

The exterior cameras can only track what happens afterwards in pieces, flashes of movement.

The man with the crowbar is suddenly slumped across the windshield. There’s blood and brains splattered over the glass. There’s a series of gunshots, and Jason passes in front of the car twice and shows up, briefly, on the backup camera as he drags the driver from the second vehicle out of his seat and then shoots him twice in the head.

Tony arrives at the parking garage as the armored vehicle that was blocking the exit tries to peel out into the street. He wants to blow the whole thing up, but he worries about the shrapnel, about where Jason is. So he slams into the front of the car, punches through the hood, and rips the battery out, instead.

Jason sidewinds up, looking about as winded as he had this morning at breakfast. Although he is, Tony notices, considerably more blood-splattered now.

“You want one or both?” Jason asks, as he steps shoulder-to-shoulder with the suit and stares in at the two men in the SUV. “Alive, I mean.”

Tony breathes in. “How many are left inside?”

“Alive?” Jason huffs out a breath that is almost a laugh. “None.”

Tony nods. The windows of the SUV are bulletproof, but that won’t help them. Tony’s about three seconds away from peeling the SUV wide open.

“Both of them,” Tony says, after he forces himself to think through the logistics.

“Okay,” Jason says. He shifts his posture, raises his gun.

“Alive,” Tony clarifies.

“Oh.” Jason lowers the gun.

“We’ll need to verify their stories against each other,” Tony says.

Jason’s quiet for a second and then nods. “Sorry,” he says. “Should’ve thought of that. I would’ve saved you one.”

“No,” Tony says, because he doesn’t ever want Jason to check himself. He doesn’t ever want Jason thinking about Tony when he’s trying to save Mia. “Don’t ever save any of them.”

And then he thinks about Mia, screaming. He thinks about someone shooting round after round right at Jason’s head.

He punches through the windshield, grabs the closest man by the throat.

\- - -

Steve shows up two minutes later, and Clint and Natasha are on-scene ninety seconds after him. Clint and Nat stay with the two would-be child killers, and Tony, Jason, and Steve go into the parking garage.

There are five dead bodies in there. It’s a mess. Tony turns to look at Jason. In his peripheral vision, he sees Steve doing the same thing.

Jason ignores them. He’s busy stripping out of his black button-down. He balls up the cloth and scrubs at his face, his hair, his hands. He dabs at the blood on his pants, cleans the wet smears of it off his boots. And then he drops the shirt on the ground and turns toward them. The undershirt underneath is dark enough to hide any stains. “Good?” he asks, holding his arms out away from himself.

Tony just stares at him. “She’s going to see blood when she sees all the bodies,” he says.

Jason scowls at him. “So don’t fucking let her see them, Stark. Jesus Christ.”

“You’re fine,” Steve says, when the silence stretches. “No blood.”

“Thanks, Cap,” Jason says. He breathes out and then shakes his head. Just once, but sharp, agitated. Like he’s shaking something loose, or maybe shaking something back into place. When he looks up, that eerie shark-like blankness is out of his eyes. “Alright, come on. Let’s get her home.”

When Tony opens the car door, Itza the Ph.D. candidate nearly shoots him in the chest.

“Nope,” Jason says, poking his head in over Tony’s shoulder. “Stand down, killer. This is the rescue team. Good instincts, though. I’m proud of you.”

She’s dark-haired and doe-eyed, and Tony’s never actually met her before, but he’s reasonably certain she’s not normally that pale. She blinks once and then drops the gun and bursts into silent, shaking sobs.

“Whoops,” Jason says. He pats Tony encouragingly on the shoulder. “Divide and conquer? You get Mia.”

Mia, who’s still on the floor, sing-shouting Metallica lyrics with her hands over her ears. “---my hand,” she yells. “We’re off to never-never---”

She shrieks when Tony brushes his hand over the tight curl of her back and then she backpedals, shoving herself against the door. She looks up, eyes wide and terrified, and then she throws herself at him, wrapping her arms around his neck and clinging so hard that he can almost feel it through the suit.

“_Dad_,” she says. And then, again, like it’s the only word she knows, “Dad!”

“It’s okay,” Tony says. “It’s okay, Mia. You’re okay.”

He keeps one hand wrapped gently around the back of her head as he moves, sidling them out of the parking garage and away from the bloody scene. She stays curled in, pressed tight. She doesn’t see anything.

Behind him, he hears Jason, walking Itza out.

“It’s okay,” Jason says. “You don’t have to look. Keep your eyes closed, and hold on, and we’ll get out of here. And then there’s gonna be a whole bunch of EMT-types who’ll look after you. They’ve probably got blankets. And Hawkeye and Black Widow are out there in their running shorts, Itza. Lucky you. That’s pretty fucking life affirming. Just—oh, yikes. Hold on. That’s a mess. Step to the side a bit? Great. You’re doing great.”

It’s a strange thing. It’s impossible to reconcile. The gore of the parking garage, and the gentle tone of Jason’s voice. The efficient, ruthless way Jason executed the driver, and the careful way Jason’s walking now, Itza’s arm looped through his like he’s escorting her to a ball.

Mia, crying in his arms. Mia, curled up on the floor, shouting Metallica lyrics while Jason murdered five men.

Jason, carelessly crunching skull fragments under his boots. Jason, cleaning the blood off his hands.

Outside, in the chaotic scramble of SHIELD agents and emergency personnel, Tony looks over and makes eye-contact with Jason. He’s handing Itza off to a paramedic, smiling encouragingly as she’s led toward an ambulance. When he looks over, the smile fades off his face, and all the blood is wiped clean, but Tony can almost see it, like shadows on his skin.

Mia’s heavy in Tony’s arms, crying in soft, breathless hiccups. But she’s alive and breathing, and no one hurt her.

_Roly poly karaoke_, he hears. And then, still staring at Jason, he thinks, _Who the hell are you? _


	8. Chapter 7

Tony has some difficulty with time, after the attack on Mia. He remembers this from the Battle of New York, and from his escape in Afghanistan. There’s too much adrenaline in his system. His brain is tracking too many things and processing none of them. He is not retaining a single Goddamn thing.

Itza and Mia are checked by the paramedics and then checked again by SHIELD Medical.

Jason is checked by nobody, and he does not respond well to Steve’s well-intentioned but frankly ludicrous attempts to bully him into the back of an ambulance.

“Yeah, you’re not my captain,” Jason says. He’s shifting on his feet. Restless. When he turns his head, Tony realizes he missed a bit of blood behind his ear. “And I’m fine.”

“Are you?” Tony asks, because he realizes that he never asked. Not once. He never asked Jason if he was okay.

Fuck’s sake, the guy could be bleeding to death, and Tony wouldn’t have the first clue where to start applying pressure.

“I’m _fine_,” Jason says. He sounds defensive. He sounds like he’s going to throw someone through a wall if they try to touch him.

“Sorry,” Tony says, “I should’ve asked earlier. Are you sure you’re not--”

“I’m not hurt,” Jason says. His eyes flick to Tony and narrow, and he looks ready to fight, but his expression softens a beat later. “Just a bunch of amateurs,” he says. “Big guns, no strategy. I’ve got some bruises. They won’t stick long.”

“Okay,” Tony says. He breathes out and takes Mia back from the doctors who’ve finished checking her over. He can _feel _the jolt of his heart, when she’s back in his arms. The slowing of his rabbit-pulse. “Okay.”

“Dad,” she says. Her voice is hoarse from screaming, and she sounds small and scared and miserable. “I want to go home.”

He doesn’t take her flying often. Not in this suit. This is a battle suit, and he doesn’t like her so close to so many weapons. But the other option is to put her back into a car. And that feels like feeding her to lions.

So he wraps both arms around her and leaves, flying slow and low and careful. It’s the safest place for her, cradled in the arms of the suit, but he feels pried-open and unprotected, like he’s standing in front of the Chitauri with nothing. With his heart in his hands, and no armor at all.

He can’t breathe when he gets back. He sets Mia on the landing pad outside the penthouse and kneels, head bowed. His heart is sprinting in his chest, and his lungs can’t pump fast enough to catch up. JARVIS keeps murmuring in his ears, trying to talk him through it.

_Panic attack_, he thinks. It doesn’t help to name it.

They shot hollow-points at his little girl. She was safe before she came here. She was safest before she ever knew who he was. He’s been nothing but a threat to her.

He thinks maybe he’s going to puke in his helmet. But he doesn’t want to pull the faceplate back, because he doesn’t want Mia to see the way he looks right now.

JARVIS corrects for the shaking in his hands. The suit holds still and steady.

Christ, they were going to kill a six-year-old over nothing. Over _nothing_. She cries when he kills spiders. She got halfway through _The Lion King_ and was inconsolable for hours. She’s just a kid. She’s never hurt anyone.

He flew a nuke into space, and he didn’t save anyone. The monsters were down here already.

“Dad?” Mia says.

He needs to get his shit together. He needs to stand up. He needs to carry his kid into the penthouse and get out of the suit and try to make some kind of plan for how they’re going to help her deal with this.

He should call her therapist. He should’ve called her therapist forty-five minutes ago.

“Hey, scout.” And that’s Jason.

Jason, who he left behind.

_Whoops_, he thinks. He looks up.

Jason is pale. He’s out of breath. He scoops Mia off the concrete floor of the penthouse patio and swings her up into his arms. When she settles against his chest, he props his chin on the top of her head and breathes out, eyes closed. A second later, he opens his eyes again, and the look he gives Tony is shitty and outraged and incredulous.

It’s exactly the way Steve used to look at him.

_Is everything a joke to you_? he hears, in Steve Roger’s voice.

“C’mon, Mia,” Jason says. “We’re gonna give your dad a break, okay?”

As soon as they’re inside, Tony retracts the faceplant and sucks in air, feels the heave of his chest against metal, feels like he’s suffocating in the suit he built to protect himself. It’s just a panic attack. He has them, sometimes. They started after the Battle of New York.

It’s such a strange, irrational thing. To know the danger’s gone and still feel it like jaws around his throat, like something ripping into him, claws sawing through tendons, pressure crushing his ribs.

He breathes and waits and hates it, hates the whole mess of it, hates being useless when Mia needs him.

_Again_. Being useless when Mia needs him _again_.

“People say you’re supposed to try counting,” Jason says. He settles beside the suit, squints into Tony’s face.

“Fuck you,” Tony hisses back. “_Counting_.”

Jason shrugs. “Never helped me either. Trust me, the _last _thing I want to think about when I’m losing my shit is a fucking countdown.”

Tony takes another breath in, drags the air against his teeth. He tries to hold the breath in his lungs for a count of five before he lets it go again. He’s not actually suffocating. He’s not dying. There’s no danger here.

“Where’s Mia?” he asks.

“Oh, snorting a line off the coffee table and drunk-dialing her ex,” Jason says. There’s a second where Tony thinks he might honestly, legitimately throw his daughter’s life-saving bodyguard off the top of Stark Tower, and then Jason shrugs. “Cap drove me back. She’s in there with him. Figure she’s probably safe as long as they don’t get in any planes together.”

Tony laughs, high in his throat and slightly hysterical. “You’re always an asshole,” he says, wonderingly. “Even after that, you’re an asshole.”

“Hey,” Jason says. He knocks his shoulder into the suit, turns to give Tony a look that is almost approving. “You got there really fast. Response time was Goddamn amazing. And your team, too. You did well.”

“We’re the Avengers,” Tony says, in case he somehow missed it.

Jason snorts. His mouth twists up, and that strange softness is gone, frozen over. “Yeah,” he says, as he pushes himself to his feet. “I know who you are.”

\- - -

The lull that follows the incident is a mean one. Natasha goes to SHIELD to help with the interrogation of the surviving attacker, but the rest of the earthbound Avengers busy themselves pacing the limits of Tony’s penthouse, waiting for any target SHIELD can point them towards. JARVIS runs searches on the cars the men used, on the guns they had, on every one of their faces, but he doesn’t turn up anything useful.

No one is handling this particularly well.

Mia seems to be handling it better than most of them. She’s rattled and confused, scared in ways that Tony knows will linger, but, after an hour with her therapist and forty-five minutes using her ponies to explain the incident to a very supportive Clint Barton, she settles into a kind of exhausted numbness.

She wants to take a nap, so Tony helps her pick out her pajamas. “Dad,” she says, when she’s tucked in, clutching a herd of stuffed animals, “you’re gonna stay, right? Here? No business trips?”

“No business trips, kiddo,” he says. No superheroing tonight. He’d let the whole damn world come apart. He’s staying here, with his kid.

“Okay,” she says. She settles in her bed, looking small with all those stuffed animals around her, and Tony goes back out in the living area and very deliberately does not allow himself to look toward the bar.

He doesn’t drink like he used to. Not now that Mia’s around.

But damn, he wants a drink right now.

He forces himself to redirect, dragging his focus over to where Clint and Steve are going over the footage of the incident.

“If they wanted money,” Clint’s saying, “it would’ve been a kidnapping.”

“We don’t know that it wasn’t,” Steve argues. “They could’ve been planning to kill Jason and then take her.”

Clint hums, mouth twisting up. “Awful fucking footloose,” he says. “Unloading that much ammunition into a car with a kid you plan to take alive.”

JARVIS is projecting an image of the car Jason, Itza, and Mia had been in when they were attacked. Tony watches as bullet paths trace out in red, impacts marking the car like blood splatter.

That drink is sounding better and better. He shoves his hands into his pockets so no one will notice they’re starting to shake again.

“They were careful, though,” Steve says. “No shots toward Mia until after Jason got out of the car. And those were missed shots aimed at him.”

“It was a test,” Jason says. He’s slouching against the kitchen island, head tipped forward, typing on his phone without looking up.

“Think so?” Clint tilts his head back, narrows his eyes at the footage in front of him. “For us, or you?”

“For the security around the kid,” Jason says. “Definitely that much. Maybe also testing to see how many Avengers they could pull into one area quickly.”

Tony’s eyes move from the video to Jason. “You think they did this just to see what would happen?”

Jason glances up when he hears Tony’s voice. His eyes drop over him, hairline to socks and then back up. Whatever he’s scanning for, he doesn’t seem to like the results. He shoves his phone into his back pocket. “If the plan was to kill Mia, they would’ve bombed the car,” he says. “They were gonna kill me and steal the kid.”

He says it flat and vaguely irritated, the way most people might say: _I got another piece of junk mail _or _Someone stole my parking spot._

It hits Tony, all at once, that Jason should be dead right now. He isn’t, because he’s good at his job. Because he is _inordinately _good at his job. But if Tony had picked someone else, they’d most likely be dead. And Mia would be gone, or dead, or dying.

“Well,” Clint says, “you’re probably right. You don’t bring a crowbar to an execution. You bring a crowbar to a robbery.”

Something works its way across Jason’s face. It’s like watching a fast-acting paralytic. Like watching nerves die. All the muscles around his eyes and mouth relax, and suddenly there’s nothing there at all.

“Shit,” Tony says, blinking at him. He wonders if this is what fear looks like on Jason, if maybe he’s just now squaring with the idea that he should be in a morgue.

“Yeah,” Jason says. “Exactly.” He swipes his phone out of his pocket, spins it in his hand, starts tapping at the screen. His gestures are jerky and unusually precise.

“I owe you something,” Tony says. It’s reflexive, out of his mouth before he knows what it is. He charges on, despite the dubious look Jason sends him. “Hazard pay,” he tries. “A bonus. What do you want? You want a car? A condo?”

“Oh, ask for a pony,” Clint councils, crawling up over the back of the coach to waggle his eyebrows at Jason. “Ask for _six _ponies.”

Jason snorts, still typing on his phone with surgical precision. “You give people free ponies for doing their job, Stark?”

And he does, metaphorically speaking. The SI holiday bonuses and longevity checks are notoriously generous. But that’s a reward for loyalty. This is something else. This is a bribe, and Tony knows it. He’s baffled, a little, at how he ended up here. A few weeks ago, he didn’t want Jason around at all. Now he’s terrified by the idea that he’ll leave, and Mia will lose the shield that just saved her life.

“If someone saved my kid,” he says, “I’d buy them any damn thing they wanted.”

Jason’s typing stops. He stares at his phone like he’s reading something, but his eyes stay fixed, unmoving. After a long moment and a deep, steady breath in, he looks up. There’s something raw at the back of his eyes. Tony doesn’t know what it means.

“Okay,” Jason says, and he pockets the phone again. “I want tonight off. I want to go out.”

Tony stares at him. Technically, Jason’s working hours ended at six. He already had the night off. Tony assumed he’d stay, because he lives here, and because people tried to murder him today, but he doesn’t need to _ask_. He already had the night, if he wanted it.

But Jason’s so protective, so diligent about Mia’s security. It’s surprising that he wants to leave. It feels off-kilter, out of character.

“There’s a Blades game,” Jason says, into the silence that greets him.

“You’re going to Gotham?” Tony asks, surprise shifting abruptly to panic. “Right now? What the hell--”

“I’m going to a sports bar,” Jason says.

“You are going,” Tony says, repeating the words in the hopes that they will shift into something sensible along the way, “to a sports bar.”

Jason’s eyebrows pull together, suggesting a sudden and definite drop in patience. “Yeah. They show the games on TV.”

Tony’s eyes travel to the TV across the room. There isn’t a sports bar in the world that’s going to match that TV for clarity. And, as long as he’s known him, Jason’s always seemed happy to watch whatever games he wanted at the Tower.

“Are you sure you’re not quitting?” Tony asks. He doesn’t know what he’d do if that’s Jason’s plan, but he’d do _something_. He’d do whatever he needed, to convince him not to.

“Yeah,” Clint says. “Honestly. I mean, if you’re gonna get spooked and disappear, at least tell us you’re going to the store for cigarettes.”

Jason rolls his eyes. “You want me to stay, I’ll stay. But there’s not a chance in hell they’re gonna try again when everybody’s on high alert. And even if they did, there’s four Goddamn Avengers in this penthouse. I think you can keep track of a six-year-old for four hours.”

“Strange timing,” Steve notes. He sounds almost apologetic, but the look he’s leveling Jason’s way is focused and intent, watchful.

Jason scowls. “I didn’t draw up the fucking NHL schedule.”

“You can go,” Tony says. Because there’s no reason not to. Jason doesn’t owe him these hours, and Tony never asked for them. If he assumed he had them already, he’ll know better for next time. “You’re not on duty right now.”

Jason shrugs like he hasn’t, in the past, ranted in affronted rage about being asked to fill out paperwork five minutes after he was technically off the clock. “Okay,” he says. He shifts his weight onto the heels of his feet, a strange, half-hearted gesture, like he’s trying to build up the momentum to leave. “Thanks.”

And then he turns, broad shoulders drawn tight, and disappears into his suite.

\- - -

Less than fifteen minutes later, JARVIS announces that a pre-cleared guest is in the private elevator.

“Who?” Tony asks, turning to frown at the nearest screen. “J, let me see.”

JARVIS loads the feed of the elevator interior. There’s a lanky redhead in his private elevator, leaning back against the wall and playing with his phone. Aside from the baseball hat he’s wearing backwards like somebody’s lost frat boy at a ball game, he’s dressed in clothes he could’ve pulled from Jason’s closet. Or, given the winkled, lived-in state of them, fresh from the floor of Jason’s bedroom.

Tony stares at the red hoodie and heavy boots and ripped jeans, and he wonders who the hell this guy is, and what he wants.

“JARVIS,” Tony says, “I don’t know that guy.”

“He’s Jason’s guest, sir,” JARVIS says.

Jason has never once invited anyone into the Tower. Even when Jessica Jones came by to help him move, she stayed outside with the moving van.

When the elevator doors open, Steve’s on his feet. So is Tony. Clint isn’t, but his casual sprawl on the coach is a feint; there’s a heavy glass tumbler in his hand. Bruce looks up from cleaning his glasses, mouth set in a troubled frown.

“Hey,” the redhead says, as he saunters out of the elevator. He grins at them, open and friendly. “You have my Jaybird.”

“We have your what?” Clint asks, shifting his way to vertical on the couch.

“Sorry,” Tony says, “who the hell are you?”

“Roy,” Jason says, shouldering out of his suite. He looks exasperated. He has a hoodie of his own, dark and unusually shapeless. “Real creative interpretation of ‘wait downstairs.’”

The man – Roy, apparently – gives Jason a slow, sleepy grin that probably gets him out of a lot of trouble. Even Jason softens a little in the face of it, tension easing in his shoulders for the first time since they left the parking garage. “Jaybird,” he says, and it’s impossible to miss the fondness in his voice. “Missed your face. Couldn’t wait.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Jason says, with a put-upon sigh. He hooks a hand through Roy’s elbow, starts dragging him toward the elevator. “We’re leaving,” he calls over his shoulder. “Be back later.”

“C’mon, Jay,” Roy says, whining even while he allows himself to be bullied back. “I wanna talk to the World’s Greatest Marksman.”

“_No_, damn it,” Jason says, hip-checking him into the elevator. “No groupie bullshit, I told you.”

“It’s not groupie bullshit,” Roy says. He waves at Clint. “You’re a deadeye, Barton,” he calls. “Beautiful fucking sniper. Second best archer in the world.”

“Thanks,” Clint says, clearly caught flat-footed. “Wait,” he says, a second later, “_second _best?”

Roy laughs, and Jason scowls, and the doors slide shut. The Avengers are left blinking at each other.

“Huh,” Bruce says, readjusting his glasses. “I always wondered what his friends would be like.”

The feed from the elevator is still playing on the screen. Tony’s eyes drop to it almost accidentally. In it, Jason’s tipped into Roy, face pressed into the hollow of Roy’s throat, hands holding tight to that red hoodie. Roy has his arm slung across Jason’s shoulders, cheek resting against the top of Jason’s head.

It’s not romantic. It’s not even all that intimate. But it reminds Tony of the way Clint and Nat will curl together, after especially bad days. It feels like something he shouldn’t be seeing. He waves his hand, cutting the feed, before any of the others notice.

\- - -

Jason comes back to the Tower at a little after two in the morning. Steve, Nat, and Bruce are sleeping in their suites in the Tower. Clint’s still up, watching _The Price is Right_ reruns on Tony’s couch and enthusiastically heckling the contestants, inadvertently revealing a deep and alarmingly accurate knowledge of the average retail price of various snack items.

Roy doesn’t accompany Jason back to the Tower. Jason makes his way back alone, appearing on the street at the very edge of the Tower’s surveillance range. His pace is even and measured when he comes back. He doesn’t seem drunk.

When the elevator empties him out onto the penthouse floor, Tony realizes he’s made a bit of a mess out of himself. The dark hollows he’d mistaken for streetlight shadows are bruises, blooming against the skin on his jawline and around his neck.

“Fuck’s sake,” Tony says, climbing to his feet. “What happened to you?”

Jason shrugs. “Sports bar,” he says, like that should be sufficient explanation. His knuckles are bruised, too. “Rangers fans.”

Tony wonders if he’s really expected to believe, after the bloody scene he walked through just a few hours ago, that some hockey fans managed to do this to Jason. But he thinks, also, about the moment in the elevator he wasn’t meant to see, the way Jason had leaned into Roy. Maybe this isn’t his business. Maybe, if Jason’s going to go to such lengths to hide something, Tony should pay him the respect necessary to look away.

“Okay,” Tony says. Because he doesn’t know if he can stop himself from prying, but he can stop himself for tonight. “Put some ice on those.”

“Yeah,” Jason says, glancing up at him. He looks grateful. Tony’s not sure he’s earned it. “Sure, I’ll do that.”

Tony swallows. He looks over at Barton, who’s staring at the screen but notably not yelling out the price of peanut butter. Listening, then. Well, Tony would be too.

“Mia okay?” Jason asks. Like Tony’s first instinct, if she weren’t, wouldn’t be to call him immediately.

“She’s fine,” Tony says.

Jason nods. The bruises look ugly as he passes. Maybe they’ll look better in the morning.


	9. Chapter 8

In the morning, Jason’s bruises look like watercolor smudges against his skin, half-rinsed clean. Tony has JARVIS run a projection of what the bruises should look like, based on the average healing rate of most humans Jason’s age, and compares the two over coffee, while Jason and Mia build a LEGO fort around themselves.

The bruises should look worse than they did last night, not better. They certainly shouldn’t look about a week old.

Tony adds _advanced healing _to the growing list of potential metahuman attributes he’s been tracking in Jason Todd. He’s suspected it for a while, based primarily on the delayed aging Jason seems to be enjoying, but the formalized list is a new development.

Given that Jason generally regards his personal information as roughly equivalent in sensitivity to nuclear launch codes, Tony opts not to share the existence or contents of his list with Jason. He shares it with the Avengers instead, sending it out to their various inboxes before wandering into the kitchen to start investigating the breakfast options.

“Absolutely not,” Jason calls, sounding genuinely irate, and Tony freezes guiltily, wondering if he somehow managed to uncover the list already. “I’ve seen your omelets, Stark,” Jason says, picking his way carefully over the Great Wall of LEGOs. “I’m choosing life. Clear out of the kitchen.”

“Listen, you ingrate,” Tony objects, “my omelets have been described by multiple people as ‘technically adequate.’ I fed myself for years.”

“And look what happened,” Jason says, which is, frankly, offensive.

Tony is still outlining the nutritional merits of JARVIS-selected takeout meals and premade vitamin-enriched smoothies, when Clint staggers his way into the penthouse and faceplants on the coach. “Coffee,” he whines, piteously, and refuses to move until Mia swoops in a minute or so later, armed with a cup that Jason prepares.

“My hero,” Clint mumbles, and buries himself in his coffee. Slurps at it like an animal.

_World’s Greatest Marksman_, Tony thinks, marveling.

Steve and Natasha show up shortly thereafter, nauseatingly fresh-faced and flushed from their morning jogs, and Bruce sneaks in sometime during the early stages of the French Toast Incident, his entrance overshadowed entirely by the breakfast caper that results in Barton, smeared with syrup, declaring to Mia that calories don’t exist if the food in question never touches a plate.

“And that’s why, kiddo,” Barton continues, licking at his fingers like some kind of medieval urchin, “nobody needs to log any of that. Little circus magic trick. Tell your friends.” He throws in some theatrical jazz hands to spice up this dubious decree and then hums excitedly when he catches sight of some syrup still stuck to the back of his hand.

“You’re silly, Uncle Clint,” Mia tells him, with open admiration.

“Sure, you say that now,” Clint says, thumbing powdered sugar off his jawline, “but just wait until you have a dedicated nutritionist with a sadistic streak and override access to your weekly PT requirements.”

Mia smiles and leans into him. They’re sitting side-by-side on the coach, dusted with powdered sugar like co-conspirators caught mid-bakery heist. Steve’s looming over the kitchen island, wiping up crime scene evidence, and Natasha, unnoticed, has stolen multiple French Toast slices of her own and is eating her way through the stack like a proper lady, perched primly on her chair at the dining table as if she wasn’t a critical component in the French Toast Frisbee act Barton pulled five minutes ago.

Bruce is drinking tea with his eyes closed, which is assumedly how he intends to deflect attention away from the behind-the-back pass he’d managed approximately five seconds after wandering into the room.

“I cannot believe,” Tony says, to the assembled troupe, “that any of you consider yourselves professionals.”

“I consider myself vastly underpaid for my skill level,” Clint says, which is an entire world of audacity from a man with syrup staining his Wonder Woman t-shirt.

“What a coincidence,” Jason says. “So do I.”

Considering he’d once whacked Tony across the knuckles with a spatula for trying to steal food, Jason had been oddly calm during the French Toast theft. Possibly because he had no intention of eating any of it himself. He’s loading some kind of unholy omelet concoction onto a plate, and Tony isn’t the least bit tempted by it, because there isn’t a god in human history who would condone the mixing of that amount of mushrooms and jalapenos.

“I offered you hazard pay,” Tony says. “A bonus, remember? I remember.”

“Six ponies,” Barton says. “You offered him six ponies.”

“_Ponies_,” Mia says, suddenly perking up, and Tony shoots a look Barton’s directly that wilts him in his seat.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to buy Mia a pony. It’s just that JARVIS hasn’t yet worked out a way to functionally and safely put a pony stable on the roof of the Tower. There had been considerable objections to the original plan to house the pony on one of the subterranean levels, despite all the daylight-mimicking lamps he planned to install.

“I don’t need a bonus for doing my job,” Jason says, as he saunters over to take the open seat next to Natasha. She eyes his omelet with obvious interest, and he immediately cuts it in half, pushing one side her direction. “I just want to make sure everybody knows I’m overqualified.”

He says it casually, not like he’s bragging. Not that he’d _need _to brag. They’re all becoming aware of exactly how overqualified he is.

Mia is alive and here because of how overqualified he is.

“If you were really that good,” Tony says, running right over the emotions he has no time for, “you would’ve managed to save some of that French Toast for me.”

Jason rolls his eyes and pops a forkful of omelet in his mouth. He chews and then points his empty fork Mia’s direction. Mia, who has syrup and powdered sugar on her hands. Mia, who looks a damn mess but who is shoulder-to-shoulder with Barton and looking the least scared she’s looked since Tony carried her out of that parking garage.

“I’m her minder, Stark, not yours,” he says. “You want breakfast security, hire someone.”

Tony – eyes moving to track his team and his kid, taking in the easy comfort of an early morning spent together – figures he’s probably hit his cap on good hiring decisions for the year.

\- - -

Rhodey shows up an hour or so after breakfast. It’s good timing, because Tony’s starting to pace the limits of the penthouse, going a little out of his skin. Immediately after the food disappeared, Steve, Nat, and Clint took off for SHIELD to continue the interrogation of the attackers they’d taken alive yesterday.

Bruce, who is neither a super spy nor a detective, had taken himself to the labs to run damage control on all the projects Tony can’t think about right now.

Mia has another meeting with her therapist, and Jason’s downstairs in the gym on another surveillance blackout, doing whatever the hell it is he does to stay in shape.

“Hey, Tones,” Rhodey says, when he touches down on the penthouse landing pad and then climbs out of the War Machine suit. “You had a circus yesterday, huh?”

Tony shrugs and then shoves his hands in his pockets. “I mean,” he says, “they were firing hollow points around my six-year-old, so. Not my all-time favorite day, Rhodey-bear.”

Rhodey’s face screws up in a grimace, and he pulls Tony into a hug. He’s sturdy and grounded in the way he’s been since he scooped Tony off the floor of their freshman dorm, and he smells comfortingly familiar, like machine oil and citrus. “Shit,” he says, arms wrapping around him. “Sorry, Tony. That’s a damn nightmare.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, because it is. It’s his nightmare. It’s the nightmare he’s been having since he realized he had a kid. The nightmare that someone, someday, was going to hurt her for what she means to him. That all she is – her whole life, her favorite color, her off-key _My Little Pony _singalongs, her truly innovative LEGO designs – means nothing in the face of how much someone hates him.

“Yeah, Rhodey,” he says, “it was a fucking nightmare.”

Rhodey holds on for a while, letting Tony breathe in until the air stops catching in his chest. It’s stupid, really. It’s a hug, and he’s a full-grown man. It shouldn’t hurt this much _or _help this much. But it does anyway, and so what the hell is the point of fighting it?

He’s fighting on enough fronts as it is.

“C’mon,” Rhodey says, when Tony finally goes to pull back, “talk to me, Tony. Tell me what happened.”

“Okay,” Tony says. He nods, clears his throat. He’s been bringing his unsolvable problems to Rhodey for years. He can work through things with Bruce, and he and the murder twins can find their way to a rapport when they need to, and even he and Steve have developed a functional back-and-forth these days, but Rhodey was the first person he mind-melded with. There’s a shorthand they’re always going to share.

“Okay, Rhodes,” he says. “C’mon. I’ll show you.”

\- - -

Rhodey watches the footage, lets Tony ramble through reliving it. He reviews the tapes twice in silence before he backs Steve and Nat’s analysis that the men have some kind of formalized training. “Looks more police than military,” he says, frowning at the screen. “Decent accuracy until the situation goes wrong. No exit strategy to speak of. Whatever they are, they haven’t seen much combat.”

“But _why_,” Tony says. “Why are they targeting Mia?”

Rhodey shrugs and then narrows his eyes, stares hard at the screen. “Huh,” he says, after a moment of focus. “How sure are you that the target is Mia?”

Tony blinks. “What?” He turns his attention toward the screen, tries to see what James sees. “You think someone put a hit out on Itza the Ph.D. candidate? You think theories about honeycomb bone structure are really that incendiary? Student loan debt is militarized now?”

Rhodey doesn’t smile or roll his eyes or crack at all. He’s still frowning at the screen. “All I’m saying is: it looks like the only person they’re shooting at is the bodyguard.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, slowly, “because he’s the _bodyguard_. You neutralize the threat, and then you take the kid. Or kill the kid. Do you know how much she’s worth? Do you--”

“She’s worth everything you could sell or steal,” Rhodey says. “I know that. And she’s probably what they’re after. But you’d think, in a hostage situation, they’d give the bodyguard a chance to disarm. If they’re after money, murder is a hell of a way to start.”

Tony stares at the video. He watches the bullets hitting the bulletproof glass, tracks the way every shot lines up with Jason.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he says. Although it does, a little. It makes less sense than them targeting Mia does, but, whatever the end goal, step one was clearly executing Jason. Tony’s willing to grant the possibility that step one was the end of the list. “Who targets a bodyguard?”

Rhodey shrugs. “Who’s your bodyguard? Does he have enemies?”

Tony opens his mouth to say Jason’s enemies are probably only limited to people who deal with him when he’s feeling aggrieved about housework or immediately after he’s discovered that someone didn’t refill the coffeepot, but then he remembers exactly how long Jason’s been in this business.

“Half of Gotham’s weird circus of horrors,” Tony says. “Some of Xavier’s least favorite people. Sure, he has enemies. But why would they decide to go after him in a way that’s going to draw most of the Avengers and a dozen local SHIELD agents?”

“What else are they gonna do?” Rhodey asks. “Climb the walls of Stark Tower at midnight and hope you and JARVIS are napping?”

Tony frowns. He freezes the latest playback, right on the moment where Jason gets out of the car. The glass on the car door is marked-up, a cluster of impact points in line with Jason’s head.

“Jason said he thought it was a test,” Tony says. “Testing the security around Mia.”

“And maybe he’s right,” Rhodey says. “_Probably _he’s right. I’m just trying to look at this from all angles, Tones. I’m trying to help.”

“No,” Tony says, “I know that. I know you are.”

_If the plan was to kill Mia, they would’ve bombed the car_.

Jason said that yesterday, when they were all dissecting the incident. And it makes sense. If the plan was murder, they could’ve brought something with the firepower to incinerate the car with all three passengers in it.

“If they wanted to kill him,” Tony says, “they could’ve just blown up the car.”

“Sure,” Rhodey says. “Like I said, you’re probably right. Mia is almost certainly the target here. I was just--”

“Unless,” Tony says, “the plan was _only _to kill him.”

He doesn’t know how it works, all that batshit Gotham nonsense. But it seems like, even in Gotham, there are probably people who would happily kill an adult but pass on the opportunity to murder a six-year-old.

Rhodey tips his head back like he has something to say, but he cuts himself off when the penthouse elevator opens and Jason walks out. His eyebrows kick up, and his mouth folds flat, and a look crosses his face like someone just told him War Machine was getting a weapons upgrade.

“Oh,” Jason says, pace slowing as he notices Rhodey. He has earbuds in his hand, and they aren’t even SI-produced. Tony wonders idly when Jason will stop insulting him like this in his own home. “Colonel Rhodes,” he says, rerouting their direction. “Hey, I’m Jason.”

“Hi, Jason,” Rhodey says, climbing to his feet to shake Jason’s offered hand. “Heard you were responsible for some heroics yesterday.”

“Shot some people,” Jason says, with a shrug. “Guess that counts.”

“As long as they’re the right people,” Rhodey says.

Jason blinks, and there’s a slow, amused smile curling up the corners of his mouth. “Well, if you shoot the wrong ones the right way,” he says, “nobody’s ever gotta know about it.”

“No witnesses, no crime?” Rhodey asks, tipping his head to the side.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Jason counters.

“Get out of here,” Tony says, before this can get truly out of hand. “You’re insufferable after you work out. Too many endorphins. Go check on Mia. Therapy’s supposed to be over in five minutes.”

Jason smirks, shares a wry look with Rhodey, and then turns and saunters off.

A beat too late, Tony realizes he’s watching Jason walk away and then he immediately snaps his eye to Rhodey, who’s staring at him with a knowing look and a shit-eating grin.

“Wow, Tony,” Rhodey says, drawling it out, visibly thrilled by this development. “That’s a hell of a live-in GQ model you’ve acquired.”

Tony huffs, trying for incredulous and missing by an obnoxious margin. “Oh, fuck off, Rhodes,” he says. “He has excellent credentials.”

“Uh-huh,” Rhodey says, clearly struggling not to laugh. “And so, credentials. Are those his upper-body credentials, or his lower--”

“I will brick War Machine like a stolen smartphone,” Tony says. “So help me, Rhodes, I will do it right now and make you walk home.”

Rhodey bursts into laughter, not even bothering to try to hide it, and Tony shakes his head and reflects on the insufferability of old friends who’ve had decades to acquire entirely too much knowledge about him.

It’s not Tony’s fault that the best in the business happened to be broad-shouldered, foul-mouthed, and endlessly competent. He hired the best because he needed the best, and, if the best happened to share numerous attributes with exactly the kind of mistake Tony used to love to make, that’s just the universe, once again, taking every last chance to laugh right in his face.

\- - -

The two living attackers crack at just over forty-eight hours in SHIELD interrogation rooms, but neither has anything especially helpful to share. They were hired by a man they didn’t know, to do a job they didn’t fully understand.

Mia was, allegedly, the target. She was supposed to be taken alive.

But the man who gave them their orders placed an odd amount of emphasis on killing the bodyguard. They were told not to give him any opportunities to engage, not to give him any chances whatsoever to disarm or surrender. They were told to kill him immediately, and to make very certain he was dead.

Mia, taken, and Jason, dead. That was the plan. And after they took her, they were supposed to meet up at a rendezvous spot that has already been thoroughly abandoned: a warehouse by the docks that, charmingly enough, is technically owned by an SI subsidiary.

The men were promised a quarter of a million each, which is a life-changing amount of money for a lot of people, but not necessarily the kind of money Tony would expect for stealing a billionaire’s only child, much less for stealing _Iron Man’s_ only child.

Jason, who listens to Tony’s translation of the SHIELD report while casually slaughtering an unsuspecting cauliflower, pauses for a second with the blade hovering over another helpless stem. “Kill me, huh?” he says.

“Yep,” Tony says. “Definitely kill you. Kill you twice, if possible. They were very clear on that count.”

“Hm,” Jason says. He looks pensive, but not particularly troubled. “Sounds like someone pulled tape before sending these guys out.”

“Right,” Tony says, “that’s what SHIELD figures. You were the victim of someone actually bothering to do the research. Granted, SHIELD doesn’t know my alternate theory, which involves someone overhearing your unflattering remarks about the Boston Bruins a couple weeks ago. To be fair, you were saying them at quite a volume.”

Jason rolls his eyes and goes back to his brassica butchery. “Marchand is an asshole and a cheat, and everybody knows it. Nobody’s gonna send a seven-man team to kill me for speaking established facts.”

Tony is struck by the horrifying realization that he’s starting to learn things about hockey. He thinks, if he had to, he could probably name at least four players for the Gotham Blades. He’s still mulling over that worrying development when Jason continues.

“Anyway,” he says, “I’ll check in with a few people, see if anyone’s been asking about me. In the meantime, we should limit the public outings with just Mia and me. They probably wouldn’t have tried this at all if you’d been there.”

Tony drops his eyes and doesn’t flinch. When the sting fades, he chances a look back up. Jason’s watching him, skeptical and unimpressed.

“I’m not saying it was your fault,” he says. “I’m the one who told you not to go, remember? If it’s anybody’s fault you weren’t there, it’s mine.”

Which is a nice thing to say, but isn’t true. It’s Tony’s fault he wasn’t at the museum, like he promised he’d be. It’s Tony’s fault that Jason felt he needed to intervene in the first place.

“I’m _saying_,” Jason continues, sounding increasingly annoyed, “between me and Iron Man, a lot of people are gonna assume that you’re the bigger threat. So they waited until you weren’t around to make their move. That’s not a failure on your part. You can’t be around all the time.”

“Assume,” Tony says, because that’s the only part of Jason’s speech he wants to acknowledge at all. “People are gonna _assume _I’m the bigger threat. See, the way you said that, it’s interesting. There’s just a hint of doubt in your voice, like you think this is an erroneous assumption.”

Jason shrugs. He does something flashy with his knife, and a second cauliflower falls to pieces. “I’ve been doing this shit for seventeen years, rookie,” he says. “We can dick-measure when you break the double digits.”

“We aren’t dick-measuring ever,” Tony says. “Because I’ve already won. I’ve got a ‘saved the world’ trump card.”

Jason scoffs at him, rolling his eyes so hard it’s a wonder they don’t get stuck staring straight through the back of his skull. “I’ve got some suggestions about what you can do with that trump card,” he mutters.

Before Tony can prompt him for a list of said suggestions, the penthouse elevator opens and Mia empties out, scampering ahead of her tutor and Steve, who have that uniquely harried, lightly paint-splattered look about them that indicates they’ve been working on another art project.

“We’ll talk about this later,” Tony says, as he turns to catch Mia.

“Oh, baited breath,” Jason says, as another ill-fated vegetable falls onto his cutting board.


	10. Chapter 9

Things settle, slowly and uneasily, like a house after an earthquake. Tony benches himself for a week, and Steve takes it in stride, which saves the both of them from having a big screaming fight about it and not changing a damn thing anyway. They are, Tony thinks, really starting to fumble their way toward a functional working relationship. 

Jason, for his part, seems unperturbed by his brush with death, although he does start spending more time on his phone. Tony does his best not to get nosy, and is more or less successful until the morning Jason’s wrist-deep in breakfast dishes and his phone starts singing from his back pocket.

Tony blinks and turns to stare, disbelievingly, while the dulcet tones of DMX ring out across the kitchen.

“_X gon give it to you_,” DMX yells, discordantly aggressive in the sleepy post-breakfast stillness. “_He gon_\--”

“Hell,” Jason says, shaking water off his hands, grabbing for a towel. “Fucking--”

“—_give it to you, X gon give it_\--”

“I think DMX wants a word,” Tony says.

Jason shoots him a withering glance, which is absolutely ridiculous, because Tony’s not the one who invited DMX to the breakfast table. From hip-level, DMX keeps howling: “_First we gonna_\---”

“Yeah, hi,” Jason says into the phone, after a sharp jab of his thumb abruptly silences DMX mid-lyric. He shoves the phone between his chin and shoulder and starts moving toward his room, wiping his wet hands on his shirt. “Charles, hey. You hear back?”

“Charles,” Tony says, blinking in the sudden quiet of the kitchen. “Charles who?” he asks, but Jason’s already shouldering his way into his suite.

_X gon give it to you_, Tony thinks. And then it clicks together in his head.

“Charles _Xavier_?” Tony says, raising his voice to follow Jason. “Did you set Charles Xavier’s ringtone to _DMX_?”

Jason flips him off, one-handed, and then yanks the door to his suite shut behind him.

“My God,” Tony says, half under his breath. “JARVIS,” he says, a second later, “I need to make some changes to Xavier’s incoming call protocols.”

\- - -

After the DMX guest appearance, Tony starts to pay more attention to Jason’s phone. In general, Jason prefers to keep his phone silent, and it’s only in the early mornings or immediately after workouts that Tony manages to catches any additional glimpses into the mysterious depths of Jason’s social circle. Tony sets JARVIS to work detecting and identifying any additional audio clues.

There is someone, JARVIS reports, who calls semi-regularly, always to the vaguely perturbing soundtrack of _No Church in the Wild_. Jason, for reasons perhaps best known only to him, once answers that siren song with an incredibly casual, “Choir boy, hey. Got something to confess?”

Tony is fairly certain that the caller tagged with _Bad Reputation _is Jessica Jones, given her tendency to manifest outside of his tower shortly after that particular tone erupts from Jason’s phone, but he has no idea who’s responsible for _Circus_ or _Hotline Bling_. Jason never actually answers calls from those last two; he just immediately declines them and shoves his phone back in his pocket with a look on his face like someone spat in his morning smoothie.

“I think he has superheroes,” Tony says, derailing yet another Avengers meeting, “saved in his phone. With pithy songs attached. I think he thinks it’s funny.”

They used to have these meetings at SHIELD, but they’re holding them at Stark Tower now, because, more often than not, there are more Avengers in the Tower than at SHIELD. Tony and Bruce live here, and Clint’s been staying in the Tower almost every night since the attack in the parking garage. And where Clint Barton goes, Natasha Romanoff is likely to follow, albeit at her own pace.

“It _is _funny,” Bruce says, looking bored and vaguely baffled, which is how he always looks when he’s dragged him out of the lab to discuss tactics. To be fair, he’s never once needed a tactic other than _solve it with science _or _solve it with smashing_.

“I know,” Tony says. “I am aware of that. But it’s also a security risk.”

“You think everything that gets near Mia is a security risk,” Clint says, rolling his eyes.

He’s been in a mood ever since Tony confiscated the throwing darts Clint stole from a dive bar and tried to smuggle into the penthouse so he could start training Mia. Training Mia for _what_, he couldn’t quite articulate. _Life skills_, he’d said, when Tony had really backed him into a corner.

“No one’s going to hear early 2000’s rap and think of Charles Xavier,” Natasha says. “And if they do, what’s the risk?”

“The risk is the phone,” Steve says. And it’s a dark, dark day when Steve Rogers is the only one seeing sense, but Tony will take the allies he can find. “Is it secure?”

“No idea,” Tony says. “It’s not SI tech.”

“Oh, _there’s _the real problem,” Clint says. “You’re just pissed he’s gone off-brand.”

And he is, of course, but that’s only barely relevant. “I don’t even know what it is,” Tony says. “JARVIS says it doesn’t match any phone on the market. We have no idea what the security on that thing this is like.”

Natasha hums and tips her head to the side. She looks deeply uninterested but still relatively attentive. “Have you tried to hack it?”

Tony hesitates. “No.”

They all stare at him. Even Bruce, who’s normally the nice one, doesn’t do much to hide his skepticism. Clint, apparently under the assumption that the open incredulity on his face doesn’t adequately convey the depth of his disbelief, audibly scoffs.

“Well,” Tony says, “I had JARVIS scan it when he was hired, obviously. There was nothing on it. Brand new, factory settings, _nothing_. And at this point, given that Jason lives in the Tower, I recognize that hacking his phone would represent a serious breach of certain expectations of privacy, and--”

“He put the phone on the list of things you aren’t allowed to snoop around in, didn’t he?” Natasha asks.

“He did, yeah,” Tony says. “It’s in the employment contract.”

“Rough,” Clint says, with a sympathetic grimace.

“And you think the phone isn’t secure?” Steve asks.

“I don’t know,” Tony says. “I had JARVIS test it, just to see what kind of data was available for casual perusal, but he didn’t get much. I can’t look, so I can’t confirm how secure it is.”

“Sounds like it’s pretty secure,” Clint says. He’s folding his napkin into a shockingly intricate paper airplane, exactly like a man who didn’t get publicly shamed for doing the same thing during the last meeting.

“Okay, so,” Bruce says, with that clear-eyed focus on the meeting agenda he always trots out whenever he desperately wants to wrap things up, “we add Jason’s cellphone to the list of potentially sensitive objects, and--”

“What’s he saved you under, Tony?” Natasha asks.

“Yeah, that’s the real question,” Clint says. “That’s why you’re hung up on this. You wanna know why Professor X gets a soundtrack and you’re stuck on the default ring.”

“Okay,” Tony says, “first of all, we have no proof that I’m still on default. Second of all--”

“Do I need to look into it?” Bruce asks. He must have something especially interesting going on in one of his labs. “You signed a contract, but I didn’t.”

“Bruce, you black hat nightmare,” Tony says. “What a fundamental invasion of privacy that would represent.”

“Do I have to take that seriously?” Bruce asks, turning toward Natasha. “Can he shame me for that?”

“I really don’t think an international spy is in any position to serve as judge here,” Tony says, objecting immediately. “We need some normal people on this team.”

“Normal people won’t hang out with us,” Clint says, as he flicks his paper airplane into the air. It bobs and weaves and then lodges itself immediately into one of the air vents. “Aw, fuck,” he says, with more feeling than the last time he was tossed off the top of an actively-collapsing skyscraper.

“Well, I can’t imagine why that would be,” Tony says.

“Okay,” Steve says, slipping enough _Captain America _into his tone to recall the meeting to some kind of order. “This is barely Avengers business. I don’t want to devote more time to this. Bruce and Natasha, verify the security on Jason’s phone so we can decide if this is even a problem or not.”

“And tell me what you find,” Tony says.

“Using an intermediary still represents a violation of the contract,” Natasha says, sing-songing it at him from across the table.

Tony sighs, expansively. “Tell me,” he tries, again, “if I need to give him a better phone.”

\- - -

Bruce and Natasha don’t tell him a damn thing. Except that, as far as they can verify, the phone is still completely devoid of any personal data. It’s not even that the data’s encrypted; it’s that it doesn’t seem to exist at all.

The most interesting thing the investigation into Jason’s phone uncovers is the external reaction to the investigation itself. The night after they start working, Jason makes a thoughtful noise at his phone after dinner and grabs it off the coffee table, answering with a surprisingly friendly, “Sorry, can’t talk. Dead again.”

He listens for a minute and then slides his eyes over toward Tony. “Oh,” he says. “Really?”

There’s another, longer pause, and then Jason holds the phone up. “Stark,” he says, “it’s for you.”

Tony eyes the phone with mild trepidation but, barring some kind of feigned Avengers emergency, he really doesn’t see any practical way of declining. So he stands up and walks over, reminding himself that, technically, he hasn’t done anything wrong.

“Hi,” he says, when he takes the phone. “Sorry, who is this?”

“Hello, Stark,” a woman says, sounding friendly enough. “This is Oracle.”

“Oh, hey,” Tony says, relaxing. “Big fan. Are you interested in alternate employment, because--”

“No, thank you. You can’t afford my salary.”

“I think you’ll find that I probably can,” Tony counters.

“Look,” she says, not sounding even a little bit charmed, “I’ve warned you before about digging into Jason’s personal life. I believe you even signed a contract to that effect.”

“That sounds like an accusation,” Tony says. “Should I get my lawyer on this?”

She makes a noise into the phone that is not quite a sigh. “You should reconsider acting in a way that might lead you to need one.”

“If you’ll pause for a moment,” Tony says, wandering over to stare out at the skyline and direct his voice away from Jason, “and consider the security implications-”

“Does it strike you as likely,” she says, “that Jason would own an unsecured anything?”

Tony hesitates. It doesn’t. But then, the concern has never really been that Jason would be intentionally careless. It’s just that Tony has learned, over time, that good intentions don’t save lives or stop threats.

“I understand what you’re doing,” she says. “And I understand why you’re doing it. But let me personally assure you that this is not an access point for anyone. Whoever’s after your daughter isn’t going to get to them through Jason’s phone. It’s not being tracked. No one’s listening through it.”

Tony’s quiet for a moment, staring out at the city. “Does that include you?”

That second of hesitation tells Tony more than she probably hopes. “To the best of my ability,” she says, “and as much as he will allow, I don’t intend for us to lose sight of Jason again. But if he thought I was using the phone to track him, he’d get a different phone.”

Tony glances over his shoulder. Jason isn’t looking at him. He’s sprawled on the couch, watching the weather report. Tony doesn’t imagine for a second that Jason is the slightest bit interested in the 40% change of rain tomorrow morning.

“Well, that’s a tricky road to walk,” Tony says, finally.

“If he goes off script,” she says, “if something goes wrong, there’s a chance I could track the phone. But it’s a chance I can only activate once. So I would very much prefer if you don’t burn one of the very few safety ropes we have by making him revert to his old daily burner habit.”

“_Daily_,” Tony says.

“Yes,” she says. “So spare the environment, and leave the phone alone.”

Tony opens his mouth to say something, but the call ends before he can think of anything witty. “Wow,” he says, turning back toward Jason. “She’s a tiger.”

“You have no idea,” Jason says. He holds his hand up for his phone without moving, and Tony wanders over to return it. “You guys sort out your pissing contest?”

Tony wonders exactly what kind of pissing match Jason thinks they’re having. “Who says it was an antagonistic conversation?” he asks. “Maybe we were planning your surprise party.”

Jason snorts and takes his phone back, sliding it into the pocket of his baggy black joggers. He looks lazy and comfortable, long legs kicked out, bundled into one of his apparently infinite supply of Gotham Blades hoodies. Sometimes, when Tony looks at him, all he can see is Jason in that parking garage, cleaning blood off his hands and neck. But sometimes, like right now, it feels almost impossible to reconcile that memory with the version of Jason in front of him.

That kind of violence should wear heavier, Tony thinks. He doesn’t know how Jason sits so comfortably in his skin. The ease suggests long practice, and Tony can’t put words to the feeling that thought provokes. It’s a strange feeling. Formless and quiet, sad and bleak and uneasy, something like the burned-out feeling of waking up, hands scrambling desperately for the wires that lead to a car battery, and finding the sharp edges of the arc reactor instead.

“Bullshit you’re planning a surprise party,” Jason says, with an eye roll that is remarkably eloquent in its disdain. “Nobody in Gotham does surprise parties, Stark. That’s a great way to get yourself shot.”

“You know,” Tony says, “for someone who talks so much shit about your hometown, you’re bizarrely loyal to its sports teams.”

Jason huffs out a sharp breath and rolls over onto his side. Tony’s interest in the stretch of his hoodie over his shoulders is purely academic. He thinks Jason’s been putting on more muscle lately. He wonders why that is, what he’s training for.

“Any team that’s not playing in Gotham is playing on easy mode,” Jason says. “When was the last time the fucking Capitals got dosed with fear toxin during morning skate?”

“I know what less than half of those words mean,” Tony says.

“Exactly my Goddamn point,” Jason says. He sounds like he thinks he’s won something. Tony, for his part, is mostly just glad that Jason isn’t demanding a play-by-play of his conversation with Oracle.

“Hey,” Tony says, “what’s my ringtone? When I call you, what plays?”

Jason glances back at him. There’s a look on his face, half-mischief and half-challenge. It’s a good look for him. Almost unfairly good, when combined with the lazy sprawl of his limbs and the stretch of fabric over all that muscle. Tony finds something else to look at.

“Can’t remember,” Jason says, with a laugh in his voice like he’s lying. “Maybe someday you’ll find out.”

\- - -

Tony reluctantly drops the topic of Jason’s phone, although he has JARVIS continue to update him every time a new song surfaces. The call frequency decreases over time, and Jason, for his part, eventually acknowledges that none of his contacts have heard anything useful.

He drops this information during a deliberately lazy midafternoon after a particularly tumultuous night. Tony’s watching from across the room while Jason and Mia work on what is, allegedly, some kind of art project for Tony’s office.

“That’s for the best, I guess,” Tony says. They only speak in generalities when they talk about work in front of Mia, and Tony has a sneaking suspicion that Jason timed this revelation for this moment on purpose.

Jason hums in agreement and then refocuses on Mia. “Oh, yeah, absolutely, kiddo,” he says, with barely repressed glee. “That’s a great choice.”

“Cuz he likes red,” Mia declares. For half a second, she looks serious. And then she chances a sidelong look Jason’s direction and immediately breaks into smothered giggles.

“Sure does,” Jason agrees. He’s doing something on the edges of the paper, coloring in a border or writing longform complaints about Tony’s character and the state of the fridge, which is another favorite activity of his.

“And you like black,” Mia says. She picks through the stack of cut-up photos in front of her and triumphantly holds one up for Jason to see.

“Well, black’s slimming,” Jason says, nodding approvingly. “Hides a multitude of sins.”

She grins, probably more amused by the face Jason’s making than the phrase _a multitude of sins_. Which is for the best, really, because if she had a vocabulary like that, Tony would have to take more care with the colorful suggestions he aims Jason’s way when they’re arguing about breakfast. Or dinner. Or when Tony’s going to be home and whether Tony fully appreciates the benefits of a set bedtime schedule and how critical it is, really, that Tony be around to say goodnight instead of, say, saving the whole fucking world from an alien invasion.

As if Tony doesn’t know. As if Tony wouldn’t rather be here, with his daughter, than half a continent away, getting smacked around by extraterrestrials with genocidal ambitions.

“Hey, Stark,” Jason says, lifting his head. “You should come check this out. Mia made a collage.”

What Mia’s made is an abomination. An affront to God, man, and country.

Jason’s dissected some kind of pop culture magazine for fodder, and Mia – in her loping, imprecise hand – has drawn several heads with varying blobs of hair and then glued down pictures from the magazine to serve as their bodies.

Bruce’s head sits atop a tiny can of Jolly Green Giant peas. Steve’s body consists of what appears to be the neck and torso from a full-page Air Force recruiting ad. For a second, Tony’s delighted, imagining the look on Steve’s face when he realizes he’s been put in the wrong uniform. The second after that, he realizes what’s happened to himself.

There he is, dark blob of black hair and a smear of blue in the center of his chest. He’s wearing a stunningly brazen strappy red dress and ankle-breaking heels. He looks, in a word, amazing.

“Good God,” he says, plucking the sheet off the coffee table, “what a stunningly accurate depiction of my inner self. So flattering to my girlish figure, Mia. Thanks.”

“Settle down, Stark,” Jason says, grinning up at him. “I’m definitely the prettiest princess at this ball.”

Tony huffs out a skeptical breath. “How could you possibly--- oh my God.”

Tony has absolutely no idea what kind of advertisement this particular body’s been cut out of. A Halloween store, maybe? Some kind of theatrical production? Mia’s picked a very tight, very Spandex, very _lady in a black catsuit _body for Jason.

“Good gracious me,” Tony says. “I hope you kept that outfit.”

“Oh, sure,” Jason says, tone deceptively mild while Mia giggles herself sick beside him. “I keep it for when I’m behind on rent.”

Tony chokes on nothing and sends him a sharp look. The smile Jason gives back to him is so blandly benevolent that he must’ve stolen it from a Mother Mary statue. Tony suppresses the urge to cross himself.

_Lucky landlord_, Tony thinks, but doesn’t say. He realizes, a second later, that an argument could be made that he’s the landlord in question. 

“I’m framing this,” Tony says, holding the artwork up to the light.

“It’s for your office,” Mia says, making a noble effort to get her laughter under control. It’s nice to hear it. The penthouse has been quiet lately.

Tony’s throwing his degrees in the trash tomorrow. The only thing he wants on his office wall is this.

Jason’s giving him a thoughtful look, brow furrowed, mouth caught in a strange half-smile. He looks like he has something to say, something important, but suddenly he blinks, and his expression fades to nothing.

“Okay, Mia,” Jason says, turning back to the cut-out pictures, fanning them out for her perusal. “Let’s do Clint and Nat next.”


	11. Chapter 10

Bruce Wayne invites him to a party, which is not, by itself, a reason to panic. But there are several discomfiting elements of the invitation in question, the most troublesome of which is its location.

“_Gotham_?” Tony says, not even bothering to keep the disgust out of his voice. “Pepp, I can’t be in Gotham next Friday. I can’t be in Gotham _ever_. Last time I went to Gotham, I got kidnapped by an eco-terrorist in lingerie made out of _living ferns_. I was terrified to ask where they were rooted the entire time.”

“Well, unfortunately, the gala is in Gotham,” Pepper tells him. “And we owe Bruce Wayne a favor. So get your environmental affairs in order and pack a tux. But do your absolute best not get kidnapped this time, because we really don’t have time for that.”

She looks utterly unmoved by his plight, probably because none of the Gotham supervillains have successfully managed to kidnap her, despite her many visits to the city. Tony’s not sure what her secret is, but it probably involves less afterhours carousing and more adherence to basic security protocols. Such things are, naturally, completely beyond him.

“Fine,” Tony says. “And Mia’s invited?”

“Specifically, yes,” Pepper says. She frowns at him like she’s trying to work out whether he’s being deliberately obtuse or just typically inattentive. “It’s a charity gala for a children’s fund, Tony.”

“Right,” Tony says, climbing to his feet. “Well. I’ll tell her to bring her checkbook.”

“Do that,” she says. “And be sure to ask nicely when you clear this with Jason.”

Tony blinks, all his forward motion coming to an abrupt halt. “Ask nicely?” he says. “For what?”

Pepper’s dubious stare intensifies. “For taking Mia to Gotham without giving him a month’s notice,” she says.

Tony lets that roll around in his head until it connects with some half-remembered thought. Something about contractual obligations. “Did I sign something about that?”

“You did,” Pepper says. “His employment contract.”

Tony sighs. When that doesn’t buy him any sympathy, he tries it again, with more drama in the shoulders. This time, it earns him a small quickly-repressed smile.

“You could leave her here, you know,” Pepper says. “It’s one night. I’d stay up in your suite, or you could call Rhodey. I’m sure Clint wouldn’t mind babysitting, although God knows what the state of your fridge would be if you left him, Mia, and Jason up there unsupervised.”

“The fridge would be fine,” Tony says, “but the _countertops_.” He fake-cringes as if Jason isn’t a man possessed with a mission to keep the kitchen in a constant state of sterile readiness, always prepared for the moment when he’ll be called upon to do a bit of emergency surgery at the breakfast table.

“She could stay here,” Pepper says. “Far away from any eco-terrorists in lingerie.”

Tony scoffs. “Ivy’s not dangerous to little girls,” he says. “And she and I worked out our differences. She had some perfectly legitimate concerns about the long-term environmental impact of some of SI’s projects. We’ve got it all settled now.”

Pepper blinks, slowly “Wonderful. I’m so glad to hear that Poison Ivy endorses SI,” she says, and her tone is so dry that it’s almost as if she doesn’t consider it a legitimate endorsement at all. “But the point is you could leave Mia here if you think Gotham isn’t going to be safe for her.”

But nowhere’s safe. Tony left Mia alone, and she almost got taken in New York, blocks away from the Tower. Even with Jason by her side, she’s vulnerable. They waited for Tony to leave, and then they went right for her.

“No,” he says, shrugging it off, meandering for the door, trying for casual and offhand and missing, like always, because Pepper can pick him apart from a boardroom or ballroom away. “Hey, maybe Batman will show up. She’d love that.”

“Of course,” Pepper says, with that same old combination of sweet smile and worried eyes he’s seen for years. “What little girl wouldn’t?”

\- - -

Tony picks the opportune time to pitch the Gotham trip. He waits until midway through the third period, when the Blades are down 2-3 against the Flyers. Mia reluctantly allowed herself to be carried to bed during intermission, and Jason’s been ramping up the emotive swearing ever since.

“Mother_fucker_,” he says, voice pitched so low it’s almost a growl. On the screen, someone in an orange jersey just took a cheap – and remarkably ill-advised – shot at the Blades’ goalie. Tony furrows his brow at the subsequent brawl and wonders exactly how any of this is legal. It looks like even the linesmen will be losing teeth tonight.

“What a shithead,” Jason says, as the Flyer responsible limps off the ice. “I’m gonna find out where he lives.”

“Are you really?” Tony asks, genuinely curious.

“Of course not,” Jason says, sneering like he finds the very idea offensive, as if he wasn’t responsible for proposing it five seconds ago. “I’m not going to fucking _Philadelphia_. I wouldn’t go to Philly to stop a Superman clone. Let it burn.”

“Wow,” Tony says. And then, just to test the waters, “I think Gritty’s kind of fun.”

The look Jason gives him would stop a lesser man’s heart. Tony’s heart, used to strain, just beats a little harder in his chest.

“I know you’re just trying to piss me off,” Jason says, finally. It kind of looks like it’s working. Or maybe like he’s begrudgingly charmed. It’s hard to tell with Jason, since the expressions tends to look the same.

Tony shrugs. “Maybe I just want your attention.”

Jason rolls his eyes and turns back to the game. “If you want my attention, try doing the fucking dishes once a quarter. Don’t defend that kid-punching eldritch horror. He looks like a possessed carwash sponge. Pick a better mascot, fuck’s sake.”

Tony mouths the words ‘eldritch horror’ to himself. Sometimes Jason’s word choice is absolutely baffling. For a man who prides himself on not being especially refined, he has a hell of a well-developed vocabulary.

“So,” he says, as Jason refocuses on the screen, “you wouldn’t be interested in a fieldtrip to Philadelphia in a couple of weeks?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Jason says, off-hand, half-murmuring it as he squints suspiciously at the game in front of him. “No,” he adds, a second later, as if his stance needed any clarification whatsoever.

“Wonderful,” Tony says. “Because we’re going to Gotham instead.”

Jason doesn’t move, doesn’t blink. For a second, Tony thinks he hasn’t heard. And then, without saying a single thing, Jason picks up the remote and turns off the TV. He turns his head Tony’s direction, and Tony fights off an honest-to-God goosebump-raising shiver as Jason’s eyes focus on him.

“What,” Jason says, voice gone unbelievable flat, “the fuck do you mean, ‘we’re going to Gotham?’”

“Uh,” Tony says, feeling oddly like he’s shown up to the Battle of New York in his pajamas. “Well. Bruce Wayne’s having a charity gala. And we owe him a favor, so. Gotta make an appearance.”

With the slow, deliberate menace of tectonic plates crashing together, Jason’s eyebrows furrow inwards. “Bruce Wayne,” he repeats.

“Yes,” Tony says. “You know who he is, right? You’re from Gotham.”

Jason’s mouth opens, shuts, and twists unhappily. After a beat, he says, “I’ve heard of him, yeah.”

“Don’t like him?” Tony says, trying to divine the fault line of this particular disaster.

Jason glares at Tony like Tony personally spat in his mother’s face. Or throat-punched his favorite goalie while cosplaying as Gritty. “Why are you asking me about Bruce Wayne?”

“Because he invited Mia and I to a party?” Tony asks. “Because it’s in Gotham, where he lives? Honestly, Jason, it’s not clear to me why we _are _talking about Bruce Wayne. You’re the one who zeroed in on him.” 

“I didn’t zero in on—Jesus, Stark. You gotta break every contract you sign? I said you couldn’t take Mia into Gotham without at least a month’s notice. This is—wait. When the hell is the party?”

“Next Friday,” Tony says, because there are merits to evasion and deflection, but Tony has always personally preferred to get his sins out in a flood rather than a trickle. Sometimes, the sheer deluge helps hide one or two of them.

“_Next Friday_,” Jason repeats. He glances toward the coffee table, directing a venomous look at his cellphone. Tony has the faintest idea what the phone’s done to deserve a look like that, but he thanks it for its noble sacrifice in drawing attention away from him.

“But,” Tony says, “if you can’t make it, I’ll take someone else.”

Jason snorts. “Oh, yeah? And who the fuck are you gonna take, Stark?”

Tony doesn’t particularly appreciate his tone. He has plenty of friends, and several of them are legitimate superheroes. A handful of them have saved the world more than a handful of times. Frankly, he finds Jason’s tone disrespectful to the quality of Tony’s friends, to the entire Avengers Initiative, and to the nation as a whole.

“Well, I don’t know. There’s Captain America,” he says.

“Yeah, that’ll play well in Gotham,” Jason says, deadpan. “Captain America can’t get you clean water in Crime Alley, but he’ll damn sure show up for a black tie gala at Wayne’s newest Diamond District hotel.”

“Why doesn’t Crime Alley have clean water?” Tony says. “Does Bruce know about that?”

“Does _Bruce _know about--- fucking. Tony. Listen.” He holds his hands in front of him, almost gentle, like he’s cradling something fragile. “You’re Iron Man. I know. You’re a big damn hero. You have some kinda scientific marvel inserted into your fucking sternum. You played Hot Potato with a nuke in space. I know that.”

Tony’s mouth falls open. “_Hot Potato_\--”

“I _get _it,” Jason says, cutting him off. “But this isn’t New York. This isn’t the Ten Rings. This isn’t Loki and the Chitauri. This is Gotham. They will hunt you, kill you, and eat your heart in the public square, and that’s just the reporters.”

“I’ve been to Gotham,” Tony says. “I got kidnapped by Poison ivy.”

“She thought you were cute,” Jason says. “She was _flirting_.”

“How the hell do you know what her intentions were?”

“Because, if she weren’t flirting, one of the Bats would’ve gone after you. And I was on Robin duty at the time. We had a whole debrief about it.”

Tony refuses to be distracted by the idea of a Bat debrief. “Is that what this is about?” he asks. “You don’t want to see your old charges? Did you leave on bad terms? Bat terms?”

Jason breathes out and then reaches up to dig his fingers into his eyes, pinch the bridge of his nose. “If you want to take Mia into Gotham,” he says, “I need a month. I need to go in there and clean it up. There are people I have to track down. Threats I have to take care of. You can’t just _go _to Gotham. I have enemies there.”

“Well, if you’re the problem,” Tony says, “stay here. And I’ll take Barton.”

Jason blinks. There’s a half-second of hesitation, like Tony’s watching him reorient. He blinks again and then closes his eyes, visibly tightens his jaw. “Fine,” he says, when his eyes open again. “Fine. We’ll go to Gotham. It’s just gonna get shittier from here, so this is fine. A gala. Fucking lovely.”

Tony stares at him. “What,” he says, brain spinning, thoughts seeking traction, trying to puzzle out how the hell he won. “You’ll go?”

“Well, you sure as hell aren’t going without me,” he says.

“Okay,” Tony says. He pauses, shifts a little on the couch. He’s not protecting his weak points; he’s just stretching. “There’s a dress code.”

“Of course there’s a fucking dress code,” Jason says, as he savagely stabs at the remote with his thumb.

The screen flickers back to life, showing a crowd of hockey players celebrating on the ice. The game’s over. The Blades lost. In the stands, Gritty is doing something that is probably meant to be a victory dance.

“God_damn _it,” Jason says, glaring balefully at the television. And then, like he’s issuing an ultimatum, “I’m taking Mia to a Blades game.”

“Sure,” Tony says, hands up, happy to declare defeat if it means he gets what he wants and doesn’t lose any digits in the process. “Sure, that’s fine. We’ll all go.”

\- - -

Jason spends more time on his phone. He starts answering one of the callers he’s been dodging, the one who’s had the great misfortune of being tied to “Circus.” Tony has no idea what they talk about, but it involves a lot of quiet snarling that Tony blithely chooses to ignore.

“Okay,” Jason announces, one morning, with the heavy emphasis of a beleaguered army general marshalling his troops for a final charge. “Look. I’m running this Gotham trip. All of it, okay?”

Tony shrugs. He picks delicately at his grapefruit. “Wonderful,” he says. “A local guide. How helpful.”

“And we’re not fucking up Mia’s bedtime for this bullshit gala,” Jason continues. “She can stay up a late for the Blades game, because hockey is good for her character, but parties are stupid, and I don’t want to be there past nine.”

Tony shrugs again. “Fine,” he says. “You two can leave when you like.”

“You’re leaving when we leave,” Jason says.

Tony hasn’t had a bedtime in decades. He hasn’t had a bedtime since his age tripped over into double digits. He stares hard at Jason’s face, tries to figure out if he’s joking. “You know,” he says, “I _am_ Iron Man.”

Jason dissects his grapefruit with unnerving precision. “You’re a smart guy, Stark,” he says. “Those suits you build are beautiful. But Gotham runs on crazy, and your pretty little science brain isn’t ready for that.”

Tony is too busy trying not to aspirate his grapefruit to formulate a reply to _pretty little science brain_.

“You stay with me,” Jason says, “and you stay with Mia. You think I don’t know what that suit can do? That’s why I want you with us. You’re bringing the firepower, and I’m making sure you know where to aim it.”

“That was almost a compliment,” Tony says, mulling over _you’re bringing the firepower_. “How do I get this kinda sweet-talk every morning?”

Jason stabs his fork into the air, prongs aimed directly at Tony’s face. “You’re not a hero in Gotham city limits, Stark. You’re a dad with a daughter who’s been targeted once already. If some fuckery goes down, you leave it for the Bats.”

“Okay,” Tony says. “I get it. No guest appearances in the superhero lineup.”

“I _mean _it,” Jason says.

“I hear you,” Tony replies.

Jason subsides into mutinous silence. But when Tony goes to clear the breakfast dishes off the table, he directs a grimace Tony’s direction that is almost – _almost _– a smile.

\- - -

They’re flying down to Gotham, and Jason spends fifteen full minutes on the drive to the airport bitching about rich people buying their way out of every possible inconvenience to the detriment of the planet at large, and refuses to be even the slightest bit mollified when Tony very diligently outlines all the ways in which the environmental impact of this private flight will be offset.

“Whatever,” Jason says, shoving his aviators over his eyes and slumping in the seat like a hungover debutante. “If Ivy kidnaps you right off the tarmac, I’m not saving you.”

“Thanks,” Tony says. “I appreciate that.”

“I’ll save you, Dad,” Mia says, sweet and earnest, while Tony helps her with her seatbelt.

“No, you won’t,” Jason says. “What’s the rule about that, Mia?”

Mia hesitates, glancing anxiously between them, and then she sighs. “Grownups save themselves,” she intones, dutifully.

“That’s right, scout,” Jason says.

“Wow,” Tony says, raising his eyebrows. “That’s right, kiddo. Leave me in the dust. Jason, should I be worried about what you’re teaching my daughter?”

“Only if you’re hoping for a short life expectancy and a high insurance payout,” Jason shoots back.

“Yikes,” Tony says.

“Jason says no grownup should ever need a kid’s help with anything,” Mia says. “And if they ask for my help, I’m supposed to tell him about it. Or you.”

Tony looks over at Jason, who’s still sprawled out, head tipped back against the headrest, sunglasses shading half his face. “You’ve been doing the whole ‘stranger danger’ routine?” he asks. “Did you talk to her about the puppy in the park?”

“Sure did,” Jason says, not seeming the least bit embarrassed or apologetic. “Puppy in the park, man in the van, armed strangers with fake SHIELD credentials. Did all of it.”

“Good Lord,” Tony says. “Well,” he says, a second later, “thanks.”

Jason doesn’t say anything, but he lifts his hand in lazy acknowledgement. Tony tries not to read too much into the fact that the gesture Jason chooses is a finger-gun, aimed dead-center at the arc reactor.

\- - -

It’s raining in Gotham when their plane touches down. As far as Tony can tell, there’s some kind of bizarre microclimate in Gotham that means it rains damn near every day. He’s not sure he’s ever seen the place in the sunlight, although that might have something to do with his tendency to only be out and about in Gotham after nightfall.

He leads Mia down the stairs to the runway, her hand held tight in his. Jason walks in front of them, with his bag in one hand and Mia’s Twilight Sparkle backpack slung over his shoulder. He heaves a heavy sigh when his feet hit the ground, and he looks toward the city with exactly the kind of morose intensity most people save for eyeing their own graves, or their mother-in-law’s doorstep.

“Glad to be back?” Tony asks, obnoxiously chipper, interested to see what kind of reaction he can provoke.

Jason tugs his sunglasses off his face, apparently just to allow Tony the opportunity to fully appreciate the dour undertones of his full-face scowl.

“We’re gonna see the Blades, right, Jason?” Mia asks, her hand still caught in Tony’s, her eyes locked doubtfully on the ugly rise of the black skyline against the grayscale clouds. 

Tony can remember a time when Mia wasn’t scared of anything. Even after her mother died, she met him with nothing but hesitant curiosity. He doesn’t know what it means, that she didn’t learn to be scared of anything until after she moved into his home.

He tells himself that fear is necessary. And, when that doesn’t help, he tells himself that he bought her the very best security he could find.

“Yeah, kiddo,” Jason says. The smile he directs down toward her is the gentlest expression Tony’s seen on his face in days. “I promised you, didn’t I? We’re gonna see them tonight.”

“How lovely,” Tony says, because he can’t articulate the gratitude he’s feeling, has no way of acknowledging how much he owes Jason, what it means that Jason is here, when he would so clearly rather not be. “Please keep me updated on all the choice phrases she picks up at this incredibly refined sporting event.”

Jason rolls his eyes. In the shade of an overcast Gotham sky, the blue of his eyes looks almost gray, like the color was leeched out of him on touchdown. “C’mon, Stark. Listen and retain. What’d I say? You stay with me, and you stay with Mia. Everywhere in Gotham, every minute we’re here.”

Tony grimaces. “Please don’t tell me that means I have to go to a hockey game.”

“It’s okay, Dad,” Mia says, swinging their hands together. “I’ll tell you the rules.”

Tony makes eye-contact with Jason, to communicate the full depth of his dismay, but, when he scoops Mia off her feet and props her against his hip, he finds he doesn’t even have to fake his smile. “Well,” Tony says, pressing a kiss against Mia’s cheek. “Thank God you’re here, kid.”


	12. Chapter 11

They’re staying at a newly renovated hotel in the Diamond District, something Tony assumes Bruce acquired strictly to throw parties, and Jason tells Mia they’re playing hide-and-seek with robots as he thoroughly and aggressively tosses the penthouse suite.

Tony sets up at the desk in the main room and gets some work done while they ransack their way around.

“You know,” he says, while Jason and Mia are inspecting the massive wall-mounted mirror in one of the bedrooms, “I’m really starting to wonder what you’re teaching her.”

“Important life skills,” Jason calls back. “I don’t know what kinda world you think we’re living in, but it’s important to run checks in new environments.”

“Because of robots,” Mia says.

“Well, Mia, the thing about robots is that the real problem is always who programmed them.” Jason’s tone is reasonable, conversational even, and he is currently in the process of cupping his hands over his eyes and pressing his face against the mirror. Tony can see them from his desk, if he leans the chair back on two legs.

Mia hums like he’s said something deeply profound and then mimics him, smushing her face against the mirror. “I don’t see anything, Jay,” she says, after a long moment of intent study.

“That’s good.” He knocks his knuckles against the glass and nods. “Sounds good.”

“Are we gonna throw a chair?” Mia asks, tipping back from the mirror and bouncing with genuine excitement.

Jason laughs and lifts her down from the dresser, propping her on one hip. “Nope,” he says, as they set off to investigate other areas of the suite. “We only break it if we think it’s a two-way mirror.”

“We don’t break anything without asking,” Tony says, feeing obligated to make some attempt at parental responsibility.

Jason looks back over his shoulder and gives Tony a full, incredulous sneer. Tony volleys back with equally theatrical skepticism, confused as to what he’s done to deserve that level of derision.

“You can’t afford a mirror, Tony?” Jason asks. “_Really_? Someone’s creeping on your six-year-old, and you think property damage’s the real concern here?”

“Who’s creeping?” Tony asks. “Legitimately. Who’s possibly—you want the kid to throw a chair at _glass_, Jason? That’s the plan you’re endorsing in this hypothetical scenario?”

Jason glowers at him. “If necessary.”

“What _I’m _endorsing,” Tony says, addressing Mia’s look of confusion, “is telling a grownup if you think you’ve found a two-way mirror. Me, or Jason. Pepper, Rhodey, Happy. Great options. Clint Barton, acceptable. Steve Rogers. Bruce Banner. Any grownup you know except Fury, because we don’t trust Fury with anything.”

“Okay,” Mia says, slowly, eyes moving between Tony and Jason. “But what if there are no grownups?”

“There will always be grownups,” Tony says. Because, while he admires the exhaustive rigor of her theoretical mind, he doesn’t want to imagine a scenario in which Mia has wandered beyond the protective bounds of the people who love her.

“And if there aren’t,” Jason says, with ringing finality, “then you won’t get in trouble for breaking a mirror. Funny how that works, huh, Mia? No grownups, no rules. There’s always an upside. Remember that. Hey, let’s check the bathrooms next.”

“There are rules,” Tony says, and is struck suddenly with a deep, distressing cognitive dissonance. How, exactly, did he end up here? How are these words coming out of his mouth? And yet, he can’t seem to make himself stop. “There are always rules, even if there aren’t any grownups in the immediate vicinity.”

_My God_, he thinks, _I have one kid, and suddenly I’m Steve Rogers. _

“Anarchy in the U.K., Mia,” Jason says. And Mia, bafflingly but adorably, leans over the back of Jason’s shoulder and throws what appears to be metal horns Tony’s direction.

\- - -

They have tickets, apparently, for a hockey game at seven o’clock. Tony spends the half-hour before their designated departure time trying to remember if he’s ever actually attended a hockey game. He has vague memories of an incident in his errant youth, involving him yelling something colorfully encouraging at people in ice skates, but he can’t quite work out whether that was a hockey game or if it’s just the solution to the years-long puzzle of how he got banned from the 1988 Winter Olympics.

Either way, he is not particularly excited about his evening plans, but the enthusiasm of the others is proving difficult to counter.

Jason is suited up in a Blades hoodie and jeans tight enough to make Tony wonder at the tensile strength of the stitching. Mia also has a Blades sweatshirt, although it’s anyone’s guess which one of the adults in her life snuck that to her. Jason’s the most obvious culprit, but, given the surreptitious nature of the handoff, Tony assumes it was one of the spies. Her hair is neatly braided, and there are actual, honest-to-God ribbons in Blades’ colors braided in.

She looks adorable. Jason looks like he might legitimately punch Tony in the mouth if he laughs, although there was never any chance of Tony doing that. Not when Mia looks so very proud.

“Oh no,” Tony says, with mock-despair. “Mia, you look so great, and I’m not properly dressed. I don’t have any Blades merch.”

Mia considers him and then reaches up to take his hand, sweetly comforting him in the face of this tragedy. “Jason says they sell things at the arena,” she tells him.

Tony presses his lips together and tells himself that, if he were ever going to be a hockey fan, he’d be a Rangers fan. Gotham is a terrible town with a terrible team, and he is, in no way and for no reason, a Blades fan.

He doesn’t need Blades merch. He doesn’t want Blades merch. He will not own Blades merch.

\- - -

Fifteen minutes after entering the arena, thirty minutes before puck drop, Tony settles into his seat beside Mia. He’s wearing a sweater with the Blades logo on it, and, if he hates himself, it’s only until Mia turns toward him and sees the horrible costume he’s dragged himself into.

“Dad!” she says, bouncing right up out of her seat, a grin blossoming across her entire face. “You got a Blades sweater!”

“They were handing them out,” Tony tells her. “By force, Mia. Honestly. I barely survived with my dignity intact.”

Jason smirks at him over Mia’s shoulder. Tony – because he’s an adult, because he’s Tony Stark, and because there are absolutely people around him starting to figure that out – manfully refrains from either sticking his tongue out or flipping him off.

“These are nice seats,” he says, instead. They’re right down by the glass, and he doesn’t know much about hockey, but he knows how arena pricing generally works. “Did I pay for these? Do I have Gotham clout?”

Jason rolls his eyes. That smirk on his face appears to be settling in for the long haul. “Does he have Gotham clout,” he says, muttering it to himself. “Hear that, Mia? Your dad thinks I’d need his clout in my hometown.”

“What’s a clout?” Mia asks and then hurtles herself out of her seat to bang her tiny fists against the glass. “I _love you_!” she yells, at the giant bearded man who skates past. “You’re so fast! You’re doing _great_!”

“We’ve been working on chirps,” Jason says, pensively, to Tony.

“She’s a natural,” Tony says.

“She told the last one he looked pretty in his jersey.” Jason’s smiling at the back of Mia’s head. “Which was pretty good, honestly, but I think she just meant he looked nice.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, half-smothering a grin in the sleeve of his stupid, hideous sweater. “She’s a sweetheart.”

The movement on the ice changes, and Tony realizes that the teams are headed off, done with warmups. So it strikes him as odd, then, that the Blades’ goalie is headed their direction.

“Hey!” Mia howls, slapping her hands on the glass. “_Hi_!”

The goalie holds a puck up for her to see and then tosses it into the air, and Mia’s hand-eye coordination is still a bit hit-or-miss, but Jason reaches up to tap the puck on its downward arc, and it falls directly into Mia’s waiting hands.

She stares down at it with open-mouthed awe like she’s never received anything special before in her whole entire life, like Tony hasn’t purchased her a small nation’s GDP worth of My Little Pony figurines in the last six months alone, like he isn’t, right now, in the process of troubleshooting how to put a pony stable on the roof of his Manhattan skyscraper. 

“_Dad_,” she says, in wonder, and then whirls around. “Thank you!”

The goalie grins and nods, but his eyes go to Jason when he starts to turn away. Tony watches, eyebrows pulling together, as he gives a friendly tip of his chin and then a wink that Tony would not, in general, describe as _friendly_ in undertones.

When Tony looks at Jason, that smirk is back, but even more entrenched. He looks incredibly pleased with himself. “You got these tickets?” Tony asks.

“Yep,” Jason says, with a wry, crooked grin that could mean anything at all.

\- - -

The Blades take an early lead, hold onto it for about five minutes, and then promptly dig themselves a nice hole to wallow in for the rest of the first and the entirety of the second period. Mia gets so upset that she has to take a nap before the third, and Tony looks over at Jason with accusation in his eyes.

“Look at what you’ve done to my daughter,” he says. “You made her a Blades fan, and it broke her heart.”

“Gotham’ll do that to you,” Jason says. He’s been remarkably blasé about the whole thing, although he’s had some inventive suggestions for the refs once or twice. His ability to denigrate someone’s professional and personal capacities without actually veering into obscenities is almost Shakespearean in nature.

“Don’t worry, Mia,” Jason says. He reaches over to pat her consolingly on the back. She’s resting with her head on Tony’s shoulders, arms around his neck. She makes a sad, sleepy noise and doesn’t lift her head. “They’ll get it together in the third. Gotham kids love a comeback.”

“This isn’t a comeback,” Tony says, nodding up at the scoreboard. The Blades are trailing, 4-1. “This is a resurrection.”

Jason laughs, head tipped back, eyes bright. “They love those, too,” he says.

And it’s not that Tony doesn’t know Jason’s beautiful. He’s known since Jason showed up in his elevator shaft with a lit cigarette and no apologies. But there’s something about that particular moment, the easy, unguarded way he’s laughing, or the way he reaches over to tuck the tag of Mia’s sweater back under her collar. There’s something about the way he looks, right then, that makes Tony realize he’s possibly made a series of tactical errors.

“Well,” he says. He makes himself look away, presses a quick kiss to the top of Mia’s head. “Maybe you should listen to Jason on this one, Mia. Sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.”

\- - -

The third period is a series of entirely improbable events that culminates in Mia standing on her chair, arms above her head, roaring with her mouth wide open. Jason’s laughing, looks almost begrudgingly delighted, keeps rubbing the back of his hand over his mouth like he thinks his smile shows too much.

When the final buzzer sounds, the Blades win it 5-4, and Mia launches herself out of her chair and bodily tackles Tony around the waist. Her enthusiasm would’ve taken his head clean off if he weren’t braced for it, and he opts to be grateful to himself for standing up instead of wondering when the hell he got out of his seat to cheer for a Gotham hockey team.

They linger afterwards, staying to watch as three players are announced as stars of the game, which is a practice Tony privately believes the Avengers should embrace post-battle. And then they loiter around for a little after that, because Jason wants to wait until the crowd’s thinned out.

Which was also the explanation he used to get them to the arena nearly an hour before the game actually started.

“You just have some sick obsession with hockey arenas,” Tony tells him.

“Oh no, you got me,” Jason says. “When did I get so transparent?”

“If I build you a rink in the Tower,” Tony says, “can we never do this again?”

Jason raises his eyebrows. “I dunno, Tony. Are you gonna staff it with top-tier athletes for my entertainment?”

“No, but I’ll let you duct-tape ice-skates to a boozed-up Clint Barton.”

Jason laughs, sharp and bright, like it was startled out of him, and then he swings Mia out of her chair and up onto his shoulders with an ease that Tony works very hard not to resent. Or appreciate. “Okay,” he says, “c’mon, scout. Time to head back to the hotel.”

He saunters through the arena like he knows it, and Tony doesn’t think much about that because, generally, that’s just how Jason moves. But they take a strange route that seems to lead them farther into the arena instead of out of it. And, when they pass several people in Blades-oriented attire before finally getting waved through a door someone needs to key them into, Tony’s suspicions are confirmed.

Tony feels oddly like he’s been body-swapped, watching Jason getting them into places usually blocked to the public. He imagines he could’ve done this too. He’s Tony Stark, after all.

There are places where he has a similar pull. Which is why he knows what he’s looking at, when some of the people they pass smile at Jason the way they do. Friendly, but wide-eyed. It’s a particular mix of comforted and unnerved.

Tony sees it on the faces of the handful of Blades players clustered at the end of the hallway, too. It’s only there for a few seconds. The goalie crouches down to sign the puck he gave to Mia, and the others follow, and then they’re just professional athletes meeting a fan. But Tony saw it, before, when they were looking at Jason.

“So,” Tony says, standing next to Jason. “You save this whole team or something?”

Jason shrugs. He’s watching Mia charm one of the defensemen by enthusiastically reenacting one of his checks. “The Penguins were in town,” he says, voice low. “Pittsburgh, you know? This was before they signed the agreement that all Pens-Blades games are played in neutral territory. Anyway, _the _Penguin got jealous of the attention.”

Tony frowns. “Fragile ego.”

Jason gives him a questioning look. “You think people become supervillains because of a healthy self-image?”

“Fair point,” Tony says. He’s not sure anyone puts on any kind of costume because they’re comfortable with what they see in the mirror. But he’s learned to stop bringing up his own weak points in public.

“Anyway, come game time, the only thing that makes it out on the ice is a herd of actual penguins. He stole both teams. I was here with one of the Robins. He didn’t have a mask with him, so I had to do all the people-facing work. He’s the one who saved them, but they saw _me_, so.”

“So they love you around here,” Tony says. “And that’s how you got the tickets.”

Jason’s face has settled into serious lines, but that smirk from before makes a sudden, dramatic reappearance. “I got back here because I helped save the team,” he says. “I got the tickets because I dated that goalie for eight months.”

Tony chokes on absolutely nothing and double-takes up at the goalie like he’s never had any media training in his life. The goalie is broad-shouldered and gangly, leanly instead of thickly muscled, with sweat-curled brown hair and lively, laughing blue eyes. He is also, Tony can’t help but noticing, decidedly masculine in nature.

“Of course he dated you,” Tony says, because, no matter what happens to him or what threat he’s facing, he’s always ready with an emergency one-liner. “He sees disaster coming at him at a hundred miles per hour, and he doesn’t have the good sense to get the hell out of the way. He makes a whole _career _out of it. He’s perfect for you.”

Jason laughs, just a silent flash of teeth in his periphery. “Well,” he says, “not _perfect_.”

There’s no reason for that to be comforting. But it is, somehow, anyway.

\- - -

Jason’s cellphone rings on the drive back to the hotel. “_Ever since I left the city, you--_” Drake sings, until he’s cut off, abruptly, by Jason stabbing his cellphone like Brutus finding Caesar on the Ides of March.

“No,” he says, loud and definite, scowling at his phone. “Absolutely not.”

“You know,” Tony says, helpfully, “they can’t actually hear you unless you pick up the call.”

“That’s what we’d all like to think,” Jason says, inscrutable and irritated. Mia, passed out in her booster seat, doesn’t wake up at all.

\- - -

There’s a batarang lying on the kitchen bar in their hotel suite. Jason sighs when he sees it. He doesn’t seem surprised so much as deeply unimpressed. He flips the weapon around in his hand as he walks from room-to-room, checking the place before he nods at Tony. “It’s fine,” he says. “Nobody’s here.”

“Great,” Tony says, voice hushed to minimize the chance of waking Mia, who’s dead asleep against his shoulder. He settles her carefully in bed and then flinches hard when she heaves awake like the Cryptkeeper, sitting upright from the waist and mumbling for her puck without opening her eyes.

“Jesus,” he says, feeling oddly compelled to make the sign of the cross. He hands her the puck instead, and she grabs it and then immediately drops back to sleep. He leaves her there, fast asleep with the puck cradled to her chest.

When he gets back to the main room, he finds Jason doing one-handed tricks with the batarang while he double-checks the locks on the balcony door. Tony steps up next to him, and Jason passes the batarang to him wordlessly, even though Tony’s pretty sure his grabby hands were most out of Jason’s line of sight.

“I don’t speak Bat,” Tony says, as he studies the weapon in his hands. “Is this a threat or a greeting?”

Jason shrugs like maybe in Gotham they don’t differentiate. “Probably just means someone was here earlier and wanted to let me know they cleared the place.”

“And they couldn’t possibly text you that information?” Tony asks. “Maybe leave a note on some of the fine hotel stationary?”

“Yeah, there’s no drama in a text message,” Jason says. He’s half-smiling when he says it, and his eyes are tracing the Gotham skyline.

“What’re you looking at?” Tony asks. They’re close together, shoulders almost brushing. Jason’s face is lit up by the city lights, and his eyes are restless. There’s a faint line, Tony realizes, running across his neck.

It’s scar tissue. Someone, at some point, tried to slit his throat.

“The city always looks so weird from this side,” Jason says. He lifts his hand and taps a single finger against the glass. “If the Bat signal goes up, that’s where it’ll be.”

The scar’s so faint that it doesn’t look like anything, unless you’re right up next to him. Tony wonders what other scars Jason’s hiding. He wonders, also, what side of the skyline looks like home to Jason.

“Thanks,” he says, voice soft, hushed by Mia sleeping just a little distance away and by the strange expression on Jason’s face, the fidgety unease he can see on him. “For the hockey game. For coming to this city. I know you hate this place.”

“I don’t hate it,” Jason says. There’s a look on his face like he doesn’t know how he feels. Half-smile, half-grimace. If Tony had ever really belonged anywhere, maybe he’d know what a homecoming felt like. Maybe he’d know if it’s always this complicated.

“Anyway,” Jason says, “I sure as hell wasn’t going to let you two come here alone.”

“Thanks,” Tony says, again.

Jason’s smile is faint, but, when he looks at Tony, there’s something quiet and fond in his eyes. “You pay me,” he points out.

Tony nods and looks back out at the skyline. He wonders if either of them still actually believes that Jason’s doing any of this for the money.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me [on tumblr](https://thepartyresponsible.tumblr.com/) for fic updates and crow gifs.
> 
> Title take from "Younger" by The Mountain Goats


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